Doctors have joined the chorus for more gun restrictions

But doctors calling for stricter gun laws are facing a harsh reality. Not much has changed since that letter nearly a decade ago. Yesterday, 19 children and two adults were killed after a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex.

“We thought after Sandy Hook, that after you saw elementary schoolchildren massacred just like what you saw [yesterday], the country would do something,” said Bob Doherty, a senior vice president emeritus at the American College of Physicians. “We couldn’t even get a modest step to close some of the loopholes in our background check system.”

In recent years, a growing number of physicians have mobilized to lobby for tighter restrictions on guns, believing that telling stories of the trauma they see in the emergency room and beyond would spur public policy. In 2016, the largest doctors group — the American Medical Association — officially called gun violence a “public health crisis.”

But congressional efforts to change gun policies in any significant way have failed time and time again, despite lawmakers occasionally renewing their gun-control efforts in the days after a mass shooting, The Post’s Ashley Parker, Tyler Pager and Colby Itkowitz report. 

Hours after the Uvalde school shooting, President Biden urged Congress to end the “carnage” of violence, raising his voice as he asked, “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?”

Just over a week ago, a gunman killed 10 people at a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo, while in California, a shooter killed one person and wounded five others in a Taiwanese church congregation.

In 2021, the number of “active shooter” attacks increased more than 50 percent from the previous year, according to an FBI report released this week.  

The Post’s Clyde McGrady:

Some doctors’ groups, like the American College of Physicians, have been pushing for action on gun violence for decades. But in 2018, doctor groups substantially upped their public engagement on the issue.

Physicians…