Medical professionals call gun violence a public health crisis.

The injured arrived at the Orlando Regional Medical Center in “truckloads.” They came with “multiple high-velocity” gunshot wounds to their arms, legs and chests, from the assault rifle that Omar Mateen carried during his rampage at Pulse nightclub. Nine died shortly after they arrived, while trauma surgeons, nurses and other health workers helped stabilize 35 others.

Medical professionals have an intimate view of gun violence in America and its growing severity. Trained for the traumas of civilian life – car crashes, falls, injuries from natural disasters – emergency-room staff are more and more frequently responding to mass shootings, of which there have been 998 since the Sandy Hook killings, and treating wounds more commonly seen in a war zone. Gun violence has become so common that the American College of Emergency Physicians assembled a task force earlier this year to study firearm injuries and create guidelines for treatment.

That such a task force is needed reflects the assumption that, absent some policy change, mass shootings will continue to happen. “It is crazy,” says Dr. Jay Kaplan, ACEP president. Kaplan praised the response of the medical team in Orlando, but says other hospitals may be less prepared to deal with a sudden influx of multiple patients with injuries from bullets shot in rapid succession, as from a semi-automatic weapon. “We’re seeing penetrative trauma at a far greater scale than we’ve seen in the past. And our feeling is, as emergency physicians, we need to know more,” Kaplan says. “It’s like responding to a battlefield in a civilian community.”

For years, the National Rifle Association and its allies in Congress have tried to exclude medical professionals from the gun-control debate, insisting that gun violence is strictly a matter of constitutional rights and criminal justice; or, if health is implicated, only in regard to mental illness. The mass shooting in Orlando demonstrated the absurdity of this position: Try telling the doctors and nurses and first responders that dozens of gruesome, unnecessary deaths and injuries don’t amount to a health problem.

On June 13, the country’s largest physicians group, the American Medical Association, declared gun violence “a public health crisis” and reiterated support for modest gun control measures including mandatory waiting periods and background checks for all handgun purchasers. Though other health groups have made similar declarations in the past, the AMA’s resolution is potentially more significant, as the organization is one of the top lobbying groups in the country.

The AMA also announced it will start “actively” lobbying to overturn a de facto ban on federal research into the causes and consequences of gun violence, which Republicans have enforced since 1996. “Were we to be able to apply a scientific approach to [gun violence], it would at least allow us to be able to form a logical and evidence-based series of recommendations for what might be done to mitigate or ideally eliminate this as a problem,” outgoing AMA President Dr. Steven Stack says.

To understand the case for treating guns as a public-health issue, compare them to cars. Both are consumer items made by powerful industries, and they kill a comparable number of people each year. Car crashes have been extensively studied, and in response to that research legislators passed laws to make vehicles safer – think seat belts and airbags. Gun violence, on the other hand, has not been so comprehensively studied, and that’s insulated the firearms industry from regulation.

Prohibiting the Centers for Disease Control from studying gun violence is just one tactic the NRA and Republican lawmakers have used to block discussion of the health risks of guns. Senate Republicans delayed the confirmation of the current Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, for over a year simply because he’d tweeted, “Guns are a health care issue.” Some states have tried to prevent doctors from talking with patients about the risks of having a gun at home, just as they counsel parents about the dangers of swimming pools.

Politicians and the NRA can insist guns have nothing to do with public health, but trauma workers don’t have that luxury. They’re busy removing bullets, stitching up wounds and mopping up blood.

ZOË CARPENTER is The Nation’s associate Washington editor.