Authors’ Response to Dr Halloran Regarding Firearm Safety Counselling

We thank Dr Halloran for her comments regarding our article, “Perceptions and Experiences of Family Physicians Regarding Firearm Safety Counseling.”1 Dr Halloran highlights the key findings in our study, including the statistically significant relationship between family physicians having formal training and their comfort level with discussing firearm safety with their patients. She also provides important information about ongoing efforts to develop guidelines and suicide prevention materials for those who use, own, and/or sell firearms. We would like to encourage all clinicians, public health officers, educators, and anyone else with a vested interest to join and build collaborations to address concerns over unsafe firearm use within their respective communities. In the same vein, we welcome any reader who is interested to reach out to us with their thoughts on how to better educate family physicians about how to counsel their patients on safe firearm use. Lastly, we would like to present a recent statistic from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that did not make it into our original article—in 2019 alone, there were 39,707 firearm-related deaths in the United States2—to drive home the need for more education and awareness on this extremely relevant topic.