 I'd like to take a moment just to set the stage for tonight's discussion. Every day in the United States, health professionals and the health systems where they work attempt to heal the wounds that firearms inflict on individuals, their families, and our communities. Organizations across the country have been calling for political action to stem the tide of gun violence in America for decades, yet as a country we have not been able to move the needle with political solution that touch upon gun ownership. And that is why Kaiser Permanente is focusing its attention on moving past politics and searching for non-political solutions. For this event tonight, we hope to hear from experts what non-political solutions they might think are viable on this challenging public health crisis. What cost does society bear? You have written about this and you know what society is paying for gun violence. The human cost is you cannot calculate that, but I think it is important that we also pay attention to the enormous economic cost that's associated with gun violence. We have costs for the law enforcement system, the health care system, people who are losing wages for missing work. Those costs add up to the hundreds of billions of dollars when we're looking nationwide. I think we can no longer afford inaction when it comes to gun violence. I always look at the human perspective of it. There are reasons why these events happen in certain communities, the same communities where people have housing issues and where there's low education attainment and all of those things are directly connected to health. There are things that we're seeing right now that could never have been predicted in 1993. There was about 1.5 million guns in civilian hands. As of 2018, when the Global Small Arms Survey was most recently released, there are 393 million guns in civilian hands in the United States. That is 40% of the world's handguns, rifles, and shotguns. It's important to understand for all of us that gun violence has several different problems. It's a multifaceted issue. There's the suicide component that has its own set of causes and solutions. There's homicide, interpersonal shootings, accidental shootings. Each of those has its own set of solutions. There's fantastic evidence out there that solutions like hospital-based violence intervention work. They reduce the violence recidivism rate and bring down violence rates in our cities. Anyone can get behind that. We have maybe 40 or 50 of those programs for the entire country. There should be hundreds to meet the scale of this problem in America. As someone who has been touched by gun violence, what solutions that you hear about resonate with you? The End Family Fire program is important because if you're a gun owner, how could you possibly be against a measure that's just going to keep your child safe? For anybody who owns a gun, it should be priority number one. This is a uniquely American epidemic that doesn't happen anywhere else. There is income inequality other places. There is mental health issues other places. There is crime other places. All of these communities coming together and saying, if we don't come together and comprehensively look at every single one of these routes plus guns, we're failing our next generation. When will we invest in urban gun violence from a lens of a symptom of an illness due to a lack of access to health care? It is a public health issue and a symptom is a downstream consequence again. It's very similar to people who are perpetually unstable with chronic diseases. I think we're beginning to pay a bit of attention to that. Things like anchor health institutions that really focus on the root causes of these things. Over 70% of individuals who died by gun suicide had had some contact with a health care provider in the previous 30 days. And so really empowering all of health care providers to have the tools to talk to their patients about access to lethal means has started to save a lot of lives as well. One of the best analogies that I've seen is the comparison to the auto industry. Fifty years ago there were ten times as many deaths as a result of automobile accidents. So they've been reduced by tenfold and you can figure out why pretty easily, right? Car seats, seat belts, airbags. If there's one small policy fix you could make tomorrow, what would it be? The actual complete passage of the expanded background check system because that is going to ensure that each time a gun changes hands we start with at least a minimum of a background check. I would make hospital based violence intervention programs universal and a part of level one trauma centers accreditation. I'd love to see systems like the health care system take ownership over this issue of gun violence. This isn't just an issue for politicians to solve, it's not just for law enforcement to deal with. This is for all of our systems to fix and the health care system in particular has a huge role to play. Why can't we just at least come to an agreement on safety measures? Wouldn't that be something everybody would be interested in?