As Dr. Sharven Taghavi sat before Cincinnati’s Public Safety Committee to testify on the connection between gun violence and food insecurity, he knew he had to be clear. It was 2024, two years after the New Orleans-based trauma surgeon first published a study that found a clear association between the dual health crises: patients who showed up with firearm injuries were more likely to come from communities with food insecurity.
“You can certainly show that there’s an association between food-insecure parishes and violent injury or gun violence,” Taghavi, a trauma surgeon and researcher at Tulane University, recently told The Trace.
His testimony helped Cincinnati secure $850,000 in funding that supported community organizations working to improve access to healthy food as a form of gun violence prevention. It is the sort of initiative that remains an outlier as political support for both health issues has waned…