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Editor's Note: Terrorism, Guns, and Public Health

When this journal was launched over a generation ago, the definition of what constituted “health politics, policy, and law” was fairly conventional. Our pages reflected the prevailing concentration on medical care as the avenue to health and on the challenge of wrestling control of costs and expanding access while striving to rationalize the chaotic American approach to health care financing and delivery. Broader perspectives turned attention to such issues as mental health and substance abuse. In the intervening years, such matters as the quality of the environment and the role of social determinants of health status have acquired their own space on the scholarly health politics and policy agenda. Further, public health has begun to encompass the impact of violence and how both to prevent it and mitigate its effects in a number of venues. Late last summer, the happy confluence of a couple of manuscripts maturing in the normal review process created a first-time opportunity for this journal to really focus on this added dimension of health politics and policy. The two articles explore in depth, with designs for improved prevention, what at the time were the realized consequences of gun violence in the schools and the even more horrifying but still hypothetical threat of nuclear, biological, or chemical terrorist violence in the United States. As this special section on “Terrorism, Guns, and Public Health” went into production, we were envisioning the benefits of publishing each of these two provocative articles—“Preventing Lethal Violence in Schools: The Case for Entry-Based Weapons Screening” by Anthony R.