Welcome to BulletPoints!

Welcome to the BulletPoints website! Our team is really excited to bring you this resource on firearm injury prevention designed for medical and mental health clinicians and educators. Physicians, nurses, physicians assistants, social workers, therapists and other practitioners often encounter patients who are at risk of violence, suicide, or unintentional injury by firearm. However, many say they lack training and knowledge about how to effectively have discussions with patients about firearms and wouldn’t know what to do if they found out an at-risk patient had a gun.

We created this site to help clinicians in California have these conversations with their patients in an informed and respectful manner, provide strategies to increase safety, and intervene when appropriate.

Our team of physicians, public health experts, and researchers is continuously collaborating with an interdisciplinary group of stakeholders on this project to ensure our content is accurate, clinically relevant, and up-to-date.

We’ve organized our site with the needs of clinicians and medical educators in mind. If you want to learn more about clinical situations where a firearm increases the risk, check out our Clinical Scenarios page. If you’re seeing a patient at risk of firearm-related harm, browse Interventions to learn what you can do as a clinician. The Basics will walk you through how to counsel patients, the epidemiology of firearm injury, federal and state laws related to firearms, and the fundamentals of guns themselves.

If you’re a medical educator, check back soon for downloadable slides for presentations, scripts for standardized patient interviews, and journal club reading guides to help you teach students about this important topic. You can send us questions or feedback by email and if you’re prompted to take our survey, please take the opportunity to tell us what you think. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.

Thanks for visiting our site! Together we can shape the future of firearm injury prevention.

Amy Barnhorst, MD and the BulletPoints team

Clinical tools for preventing firearm injury