22 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • MARCH 2020
PRESS BUSINESS
LI NATIVE AND PARKLAND VICTIM’S DAD SPEAKS OUT
continued from page 21
Guttenberg made his comments at the
Seventh Annual Emergency Medicine
Interest Group Symposium, sponsored
by the Donald and Barbara Zucker
School of Medicine at Hofstra-Northwell.
The topic was the Role of Policy,
Advocacy, and Gun Violence in Emergency
Medicine. Guttenberg’s visit was
part of his campaign for gun safety and
Northwell Health’s eff ort to mobilize
the healthcare industry to reduce gun
violence as a health hazard.
The annual death toll due to guns in the
United States last year topped 40,000,
surpassing those due to car collisions.
“This is about people and the eff ect
on families and the community in
general,” Dowling told the group. “It's
not only the mass shootings. It’s gun violence
every day in cities and localities
and rural areas all over the country.”
Northwell in December 2019 hosted a
Gun Violence Prevention Forum, and
is creating a Center for Gun Violence
Prevention, which Dowling says “will
help shape the role that Northwell and
other health systems can play in advancing
safety, education, prevention
and research.”
“If vaping is a health issue, gun violence
is a health issue,” Dowling said. “If ill
eff ects from putrid water are a public
health issue, why is the result of gun
violence not a public health issue?”
Dr. Jeff rey Oestreicher, chair of the
New York State American Academy
of Pediatrics’ gun violence prevention
program, said the Dickey Amendment
in 1996 indicated the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention’s
funds for injury prevention couldn’t
be used to “advocate or promote gun
control.”
“It didn’t literally ban gun violence research,”
he said. “It banned advocacy.
But its real intent and one it achieved
was to scare researchers and the federal
government.”
That led to a de facto ban on federally
funded gun violence research until
Congress in 2019 appropriated $25
million for the CDC and National Institute
of Health to fund gun violence
prevention research.
“If you can change the debate, change
the articulation of the issue to a public
health issue, you potentially can
get more public traction rather than
focusing on the Second Amendment,”
Dowling said. “In my view, that’s a
separate issue. We should be focusing
on safety.”
While Northwell officials looked
at the larger issues, ranging from
statistics to solutions to improve
safety, Guttenberg put a personal
face on gun violence. He created
Orange Ribbons for Jaime honoring
his daughter’s memory and Orange
Ribbons for Gun Safety, advocating
for gun safety.
“My daughter’s favorite color was
orange,” he said, wearing an orange
ribbon and bracelet. “From the night
she was killed, friends from the dance
studio came over wearing orange
ribbons.”
They made thousands of orange ribbons
for attendees to wear at Jaime’s
funeral. When someone at a supermarket
asked Guttenberg what the ribbon
was for, he learned he was closer than
he realized to a cause.
“They said that’s the color of the gun
safety movement,” Guttenberg said.
“I didn’t know that. I just knew it was
Jaime’s favorite color.”
“If vaping is a health issue, gun violence is a
health issue,” Michael Dowling said.
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