Garen J. Wintemute is an

emergency medicine Emergency medicine is the medical speciality concerned with the care of illnesses or injuries requiring immediate medical attention. Emergency physicians (often called “ER doctors” in the United States) continuously learn to care for unsche ...

physician at

UC Davis Medical Center UC Davis Medical Center is part of UC Davis Health and a major academic health center located in Sacramento, California. It is owned and operated by the University of California as part of its University of California, Davis campus. The medical c ...

, in the US state of California, where he is the director of the Violence Prevention Research Program. He conducts research in the fields of

injury epidemiology Epidemiology is the study and analysis of the distribution (who, when, and where), patterns and determinants of health and disease conditions in a defined population. It is a cornerstone of public health, and shapes policy decisions and evidenc ...

and the prevention of

firearm violence Gun-related violence is violence committed with the use of a firearm. Gun-related violence may or may not be considered criminal. Criminal violence includes homicide (except when and where ruled justifiable), assault with a deadly weapon, a ...

. He has been named a "hero of medicine" by ''

Time Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to ...

'' magazine. He is the director of the University of California Firearm Violence Research Center, which was established in 2017; the center is the first state-funded gun violence research center in the country.

Research

Wintemute is one of a few public health experts researching gun violence in the United States—he has said that there are only a dozen researchers in the United States who study this subject, including him. He has funded this research in part through more than $1 million of his own money. In 1987, he published a study on accidental gun deaths among children in California, of which 88 occurred between 1977 and 1983. The same study found that in about one-third of incidents, the shooter did not know the gun was loaded or real. At a press conference to announce the study's results, multiple real guns like those involved in the accidental deaths were placed next to toy lookalikes; few of the reporters in attendance could tell them apart. His research on

Saturday night special Saturday night special is a colloquial term in the United States and Canada for inexpensive, compact, small-caliber handguns made of poor quality metal. Sometimes known as junk guns, some states define these guns by means of composition or mate ...

handguns, especially a 1994 study he published entitled "Ring of Fire", has been credited as the main reason for the California government's efforts to impose strict regulations on them. In 2017 he has published a study showing that gun owners with an alcohol-related criminal conviction are more likely than gun owners without such a conviction to be arrested for a subsequent gun-related crime.

References

External links

Garen J. Wintemute
UC Davis Health System, Department of Emergency Medicine Living people American public health doctors Johns Hopkins University alumni University of California, Davis alumni American emergency physicians University of California, Davis faculty Gun violence researchers Year of birth missing (living people) {{US-academic-bio-stub