Political debate can turn an issue as important as gun violence into an abstract subject, which reduced victims into mere statistics. However, according to Haag (2018) and Howard (2018), there is a new interest group, made up of clinicians that play the role of champions for the victims. In an ingenious campaign, the interest group made up mainly of physicians sought to humanize the issue by presenting the vagaries of gun violence in their gory nature. The doctors used Twitter to post photographs of gory scenes in the emergency room occasioned by gun violence. Some of the physicians showed the bloody soiled attires they wore as they struggled to save the lives of gunshot victims. As implied in the tweets, even the patients who survive lose so much blood that their lives change irrevocably. Others do not make it. The doctors also used academic journals to post anti-gun violence articles. This campaign falls within the obligation of clinicians as champions and advocates of patients, who include members of the public at large (Mason et al., 2016).
However, the two articles Haag (2018) and Howard (2018) do not stem from the efforts of the brave physicians to lobby against gun violence but rather from an attack against the doctors by the National Rifle Association, perhaps the most powerful interest group in America. The NRA tweeted a message against the doctors, and the tweet immediately made national news. The doctors put in a lot of work while the NRA only made a tweet, yet the latter made a bigger impression than the former. The primary difference between the two approaches is money. The most successful interest groups in the USA are those that spend the most amounts of money on their causes. Herein lies the key to the success of the new interest group, that the NRA calls "Anti-gun" doctors. They need to use their influence in society and raise as much money as possible. Using these funds, they should engage public relations experts who will get their message out to the public in a favorable manner, just as the NRA does.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
References
Haag, M. (2018, November 13). Doctors Revolt After N.R.A. Tells Them to 'Stay in Their Lane' on Gun Policy. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/us/nra-stay-in-your-lane-doctors.html .
Howard, J. (2018, November 21). Doctors start movement in response to NRA. Retrieved from https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/19/health/nra-stay-in-your-lane-physicians-study/index.html .
Mason, D. J., Gardner, D. B., Outlaw, F. H., & OGrady, E. T. (2016). Policy & politics in nursing and health care . St. Louis, MO: Elsevier.
