WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has removed the 2024 surgeon general’s advisory on gun violence from its website. A link to the Office of the Surgeon General’s publications on firearm violence displays a “Page Not Found” message.
“HHS and the Office of the Surgeon General are complying with President Trump’s Executive Order on Protecting Second Amendment Rights,” agency spokesman Andrew Nixon said in an email Tuesday.
Trump issued an executive order last month calling for the attorney general to “examine all orders, regulations, guidance, plans, international agreements, and other actions of executive departments and agencies” related to Second Amendment rights and all “Presidential and agencies’ actions from January 2021 through January 2025 that purport to promote safety but may have impinged on the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens,” according to the order.
In June 2024, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy declared in a major advisory that gun violence in the United States is a public health crisis and demanded urgent action, calling for more research and stronger laws to reduce harm.
The advisory was the first time a publication from the country’s leading voice for public health focused on firearm violence and its impact on public health. There were 46,726 firearm-related deaths in the U.S. in 2023, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This is just 4% fewer than the three-decade high reached in 2021 when 48,830 people died from firearms.
Trump’s pick for surgeon general, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, has not yet been scheduled for a confirmation hearing.
The removal of the advisory comes after the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which was implemented during the Biden administration, apparently ceased operations in January and its website stopped working. The office created the first-ever federal Gun Violence Emergency Response Team, which included the FBI, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other federal agencies, and coordinated the federal response to mass shootings and community violence.
The gun violence prevention organization Giffords, named after its founder former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, has criticized the removal of the surgeon general’s gun violence advisory webpage.
“By removing this important public health advisory with lifesaving resources, President Trump has chosen to prioritize gun industry profits over protecting kids and families,” Giffords executive director Emma Brown said in part in a news release Monday. “Guns have been the No.1 killer of American children and adolescents since 2020, and non-partisan health care experts have understood gun violence as a public health crisis for years. Under President Trump’s first term, gun homicides rose 34%.”
Contributing: Emma Tucker
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
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