New Hampshire’s largest health system is calling for more action on gun safety after last month’s mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine.
In an op-ed published by some New Hampshire news outlets last week, leaders at Dartmouth Health said preventing gun deaths should be seen as a public health issue – not a political one.
“As health systems, sometimes we’re the only public health provider,” Dr. Joanne Conroy, Dartmouth Health’s president and CEO, told NHPR. “That is a group can actually stand up and say, ‘We need to have different solutions.’ ”
New Hampshire has lower rates of gun deaths than the country as a whole. But the vast majority of those deaths are suicides, which killed an average of 125 Granite Staters per year between 2017 and 2021, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. New Hampshire’s rates of gun suicide were higher than the national average in most of those years.
Source : NHPR