There are issues with viewing so-called gun violence as a public health issue.

Sure, we could argue that shootings tend to act almost like a virus, starting in one place, and then spreading out as various people retaliate, so if we look at it via a public health framework that way, we might be able to stop the cycle in its tracks.

But too many people want to go well beyond that, people like Jonathan Metzl, a professor of sociology and psychiatry and director of the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University. 

It seems he wants a public health view of gun violence, too, but he's focusing on the wrong word in that term.

Metzl referenced his newest book, What We’ve Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms, where he explores how the topic of guns is not only a conversation about safety or law, but one of identity. 

“There are issues about identity that I think are important to think about, which is the polarization where people’s identities become oppositional to each other,” Metzl said. “People get on different sides of these issues, about issues of safety, and for them that’s a really deeply existential and deeply psychoanalytic topic of asking how exactly these identities form.”

Metzl said that drastically different opinions across the country create a polarized political sphere among voters, politicians, and legislators when it comes to gun violence.

“Americans basically are divided almost down the middle about what mass shootings mean,” Metzl said. “Half of our country thinks we need more regulation, and the other half of the country says this means we need more guns.”

While the U.S. has made powerful strides toward resolving other public safety concerns by enacting a ban on smoking or educating the public about its associated risks, the same cannot be said about gun safety, Metzl said. 

“We made people believe, and rightly so, that secondhand smoke is a risk, that being in a car without a seatbelt is a risk,” Metzl said. “The question is, why didn’t we convince the entire country to do the same thing, but with guns?”

Maybe because, as the little children's tune goes, "one of these things is not like the others."

There are no health benefits to smoking. The odds of your life being saved by not wearing a seatbelt might not be zero, but they're close enough.

Meanwhile, guns are used millions of times every year to defend life. That's more often than they're used to threatening it, which means that we're not going to just treat guns the same as seatbelt laws or second-hand smoke.

But Metzl either doesn't know this or doesn't want the people he's speaking to knowing it.

My guess is the latter, but I'm just not a very trusting person these days.

The reason the nation is divided on this is because a lot of us do grok this simple fact. We're not willing to give up our ability to protect our life simply because other people misuse these same tools to threaten people. Especially when we know that these people will just do what they were going to do anyway regardless of what laws you put in place.

For a professor and someone well placed in his career, one has to notice how little Metzl understands about the real world, particularly when it comes to guns, yet he wrote a book on it and is held up as an expert.

That's downright horrifying.