18 Children Among 26 Dead in Conn Elementary School Shooting

More than 100 researchers sent a letter yesterday to Vice President Joseph Biden asking the government to boost research on gun violence. Biden heads up the White House's Gun Violence Commission, which is looking into ways to reshape national policies in the wake of last month's mass shooting of schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut.

The researchers' petition, sent under the letterhead of the University of Chicago social science center known as the Crime Lab, says that "politically motivated constraints" have held back U.S. research on gun-related violence since the mid-1990s. That's when groups backing private gun ownership, including the National Rifle Association, leaned on Congress to limit such research. The lobbying push came after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) highlighted firearms-linked deaths as a preventable public health problem.

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On the last morning of her life, Emilie Parker, 6, climbed into bed with her mom and they cuddled. #SandyHook5yrs

Our Mission: Prevent gun-related deaths due to crime, suicide and accidental discharge so that no other parent experiences the senseless, horrific loss of their child.

There is something distinctly American about this way of death. Mass shootings1 happen in other countries, but they are far more common here. Between 1966 and 2012, there were 90 such incidents in the U.S. The next four countries with the most mass shootings had 54 combined. There is also something distinctly American about how we respond to these events, the way they become tangled up in the national debate about guns — this question of how to reduce deaths attributable to a weapon protected in the founding documents of our land. No other country has that particular challenge.

This, of course, has already happened with the mass shooting on Sunday in Las Vegas that left at least 58 people dead and hundreds more injured.

And this is a problem. What we know about mass shootings suggests that they are different from the everyday deaths that happen at the end of a gun. The weapon is the same. So much else is different. And the distorted image we get by using one as a lens through which to view the other has consequences for our understanding of the problem and the policies that might address it.

This interactive graphic is part of our project exploring the more than 33,000 annual gun deaths in America and what it would take to bring that number down. See our stories on suicides among middle-age men, homicides of young black men and accidental deaths, or explore the menu for more coverage.

She would wake up and get ready for work just like it was any other day.

I am grateful to know that she was so happy that morning, playing jokes on her colleague, helping to get a coffee stain out of a sweater
returning a perfectly folded scarf that she borrowed to wear to the winter concert the night before.

Her morning at work would start out like any other. Busy, efficient. She did not know that the PPT meeting would be her last. She heard a noise and silenced the room.
Was that gunshots? Holy sh*t, it was gunshots! She stood from her chair and walked towards the door of the conference room. She saw the shooter. She turned briefly to warn the others. “SHOOTER, STAY PUT!”

I wonder if she knew that those words would be her last. I wonder if she knew she would be killed for walking out of that room. I wonder what she thought in those seconds between being hit and death. Pain? The school? Her children? Mom? Grandchildren?

At the end of an inconspicuous hallway and strategically placed far from the controlled chaos of the trauma room lies a dimly lit waiting area that we in the medical field call “the quiet room.” It is a bland spot; a few soft chairs surround a table that holds a box of crisp institutional tissues. There may be a picture or two on the wall, but generally it is an unassuming room where we physicians tell mothers about the deaths of their children, far too often because of firearm violence.

As we make our way to this room, we recite a careful script; we use words intended to ease this painful first-and-only meeting. The reality is that over the years, we have found that there is no good way to tell a mother that her child has died, especially when the unexpected death might have been avoidable.

We introduce ourselves as the doctor who took care of their child. We take a deep breath, look into their eyes, and quickly break the devastating news — there is no reason to delay. What follows is the visceral, piercing shriek of a mother’s wailing, “Please God, not my baby!” We often weep with these mothers, we sometimes quietly blame ourselves for not being able to do more to save their baby’s life — and when they are alone, as is often the case, we hold them up while they cry.

We walk away from the encounter, our stomachs churning from the stale, metallic scent of a child’s blood barely dried on our clogs, our faces streaked with tears, and our hearts gripped in a vise as we tell ourselves that this senseless dying must end. But it doesn’t end. Another child is shot, and another mother is heartbroken.

There is nothing quiet about this room.