Our Mission
BulletPoints provides clinical tools for firearm injury prevention
Our mission is to teach medical and mental health care providers how to reduce the risk of firearm injury in their patients.
The majority of clinicians feel that preventing firearm injury is within the scope of their practice, and patients are generally receptive to having these conversation with their doctors. However, most clinicians say they don’t routinely counsel patients, citing lack of education on how to do so as one of the main reasons. Many also say they wouldn’t know what to do if they discovered someone at risk had access to a gun. Although several major medical societies have endorsed clinicians’ role in reducing firearm injury, the topic remains largely absent from medical and nursing school curricula.
In 2019, California Assembly Bill 521, sponsored by Assemblymember Marc Berman and signed in October 2019, authorized three years of funding through the California Firearm Violence Research Center at UC Davis to fill that gap. Building on the prior work of the What You Can Do Initiative, the BulletPoints Project was born.
We believe that a well-informed, politically neutral, and collaborative approach to firearm injury prevention is the most effective way to save lives.
The BulletPoints website — developed by our interdisciplinary team along with input from health care providers, researchers, legal experts, medical educators, and firearm owners — is designed to provide clinicians with the knowledge and tools they need to discuss the risks of firearm access with their patients and to intervene when someone is at increased risk.
This website incorporates the best available research, clinical best practices, and evidence-based recommendations to help clinicians become more informed, more effective partners in keeping their patients safe and in reducing the overall burden of firearm injuries.
Read about what motivated us to establish the BulletPoints Project in our December 2020 blog post, “Giving Clinicians the Tools They Need to Prevent Firearm Injury in Their Patients.”
Page last updated October 2020.