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Seized weapons in the Sacramento police department's property room remind Wintemute that handgun wounds are more than seven times as likely to be fatal as knife wounds
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In fact, he says, emergency care of gunshot victims has reached
such a high level of skill that little can be done to increase
the survival rate. For this reason, he is looking to prevention
as the best way to curb gunshot deaths. He and like-minded
colleagues represent a new breed of physician eager to affect
public policy about gun violence by using their special insights
as healers. "The doctors realized people were being shot faster
than they could sew them up," says U.C. Berkeley law professor
Franklin Zimring, the "dean" of firearms-policy scholars. "So
they decided to do something about it."
Relying on the same epidemiological techniques used to track dangerous pathogens, Wintemute and his associates at U.C. Davis seek out patterns and trends in the data that federal and state governments keep on firearms: types of guns sold, who buys and sells them and the background of shooters and victims alike. Wintemute's 1994 study Ring of Fire, for example, takes a hard look at gunmakers around Los Angeles. It has been hailed as a major indictment of the cheapie pistols known as "Saturday-night specials," the weapons of choice of inner-city gangs. The California effort to impose tough new regulations to control their manufacture and sale is largely in response to this study. Wintemute, 46, who knots his dusky blond hair into a discreet ponytail, could easily be cast in TV's ER series--if he were not so determined to play by his own script. Born and reared in Long Beach, Calif., the son of a chemist-turned-businessman father and a schoolteacher mother, he majored in biology at Yale and later did some graduate work in neurophysiology. Eventually switching to medical school at U.C. Davis, he decided to study emergency medicine, a pressure-cooker specialty that suited his go-go personality. "It's practicing medicine on the run," he says. "It's about making instantaneous decisions." He was so good at his job as an E.R. physician in the Sacramento area that he was recruited for an unpaid three-month stint caring for Cambodian refugees at a bush camp in eastern Thailand. Treating the injuries resulting from Cambodia's civil war reinforced his feelings about gun violence. "We saw 20 or 30 cases of battle trauma a day," he says." During an interlude at Johns Hopkins University's school of public health, he co-authored a law-journal paper with his professor, Stephen Teret, in which he used epidemiological evidence to explore handgun injuries: how they occurred and who was involved. The study raised the intriguing possibility of assessing gun manufacturers for damages. "We have learned since the 1960s, with both tobacco and motor vehicles, that explicitly holding the manufacturers accountable for what their products do has real benefit," says Wintemute. On his return to California, he began looking more deeply into gun violence by examining the instruments of death themselves. Though he had a childhood familiarity with some guns and had later taught shooting at a ymca summer camp, Wintemute began to approach the subject more seriously. He got a gun seller's license, went to gun shows to learn about the firearms business, joined the National Rifle Association--"to find out what they were up to"--and began target shooting to try to understand the allure of guns. At a recent conference of physicians studying gun violence, he turned out to be the best shot.
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