The surgeon who operated on YouTube shooting victims just made a viral plea for gun reform

Yesterday’s horrifying shooting at the headquarters of tech giant YouTube was yet another sharp reminder that in America, you can’t truly be safe from gun violence anywhere, no matter where you work or where you live.

The shooting of three people in San Berno by what appears to have been a disgruntled customer was met with the usual response from the government – calls for thoughts and prayers, praise for first responders, and nothing of any substance.

Disgusted with the harrowing toll that gun violence reaps from our nation and the continual refusal to do anything to reduce it by the political establishment, trauma surgeon Andre Campbell — who helped treat some of the YouTube shooting victims — publicly called for action in a moving interview this morning.

“This is a terrible day in the United States” mourned Dr. Campbell. “To think that after we’ve seen Las Vegas, Parkland, the Pulse nightclub shooting, that we would see an end to this, but we have not.”

He didn’t shy away from calling out the media, chastising them for focusing only on the mass shootings and less on the quiet but far more frequent occurrences of small-scale shootings that don’t attract the same kind of attention but which leave the same suffering and emotional pain for the victims and their families.

“Gun violence happens every day throughout the United States. It happens here in San Francisco. It happens in the Bay Area. It happens all over the country,” Campbell said. “But I don’t see you guys out here because I’d like to make sure that people know that we got a serious problem that we need to address. I don’t have all the answers … at least we’re having a discussion about it nationally. This is a real problem.”

“I didn’t see all these cameras out here … last week when I was here. That’s the problem, when something like this happens, which is terribly unfortunate, then you guys come out,” Campbell said. “The reality is we have to deal with this all the time. We have to deal with the families.”

Campbell works in San Francisco’s only level 1 trauma center and has to grapple with the bloody toll from gun violence every day; his operating room has seen multiple shooting victims in both of the past two weeks.

Enough is enough, he says – and we couldn’t agree more.

Natalie Dickinson

Natalie is a staff writer for the Washington Press. She graduated from Oberlin College in 2010 and has been freelance blogging and writing for progressive outlets ever since.