They say it takes a public health approach to address the problem, such as road safety measures, changes in products and traffic laws that reduced the number of deaths in crashes for decades, even as the number of cars on the streets increased.
An example: metal railings highway safety are now curves in relation to the ground instead of straight edges that pose a threat outstanding at the time of a crash.
"People used to be skewered and We blamed the drivers for it," said Garen Wintemute physician, professor of emergency care who directs the Research Program on Violence Prevention at the University of California, Davis campus.
To reduce the number of deaths at the time, not enough to try to improve the driving skills of people, and today is not enough to address gun violence simply focusing on people who commit the shootings, according to Wintemute and other physicians.
What these experts suggest is a pragmatic, science-based, grounded in the reality of a society saturated with weapons to seek better ways to prevent the damage they cause.
The need for a new approach crystallized on Sunday for one of the nation's leading experts on gun violence, the doctor Stephen Hargarten. The doctor treated several victims of the shooting at a Sikh temple in the emergency department he runs in Milwaukee. Seven people were killed, including the assailant, and three were seriously injured.
The incident occurred two weeks after the shooting that killed 12 people and wounded 58 others in a theater in Colorado, and two days before a man pleaded guilty to killing six people and wounding 13 others, among them the then Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Tucson, Arizona, last year.
"What distresses me is: Is this a new social norm? Is it with this with what we have to live if we have more personal access to firearms?" Said Hargarten, chief of emergency medicine at the hospital Froedtert and Director of Trauma Research Center of Wisconsin Medical School.
"We have a problem of public health care," he said. "Are we going to wait for the next outbreak or something we can do about it?".
Between 260 and 300 million firearms are in civilian hands in the U.S., where nearly a third of households have one. Firearms are used in two thirds of the homicides, according to FBI figures.
In about 9% of violent crime using a firearm, or about 338,000 cases each year.
More than 73,000 patients were treated in emergency rooms in 2010 due to firearm injuries, according to estimates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, United States (CDC, for its acronym in English).
