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As America grapples with gun violence, members of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee grappled with whether that violence has become such a crisis that it should be a considered a public health emergency, with emergency room doctors and other health care professionals on the front lines. “In cities like Chicago dealing with the constant drumbeat of gun violence, it has turned these public health officials into battlefield experts,” said U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), who chairs the committee. “They’ve seen the aftermath of bullets tearing through bone like it’s tissue paper.” With “132 Americans every day dying from gun violence,” he said, “gun violence is a public health epidemic, plain and simple.” (Vinicky, 11/28)

U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats on Tuesday discussed how to treat gun violence as a public health crisis, in hopes of building upon last year’s federal gun safety legislation. “Across the country, gun violence is a public health epidemic,” Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin, the chairman of the committee, said in his opening remarks. Senate Republicans pushed back against framing gun violence as a public health crisis and argued that approach would violate the Second Amendment and that the focus should be on mental health. “The fact is a firearm in the hands of a law-abiding citizen is not a threat to public safety,” the top Republican on the committee, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, said. (Figueroa, 11/28)

Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana was confronted about the high firearms death rate in his home state during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on gun violence. During Tuesday's hearing, Kennedy asked Dr. Megan Ranney, dean of the Yale School of Public Health, about gun violence in Chicago, Illinois, a city conservatives frequently say has a high crime rate due to progressive prosecutorial policies. ... Ranney responded by pointing out that Kennedy's home state of Louisiana has a higher firearms death rate than Chicago. Louisiana has a Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards, while Republicans hold control of both chambers of the state legislature. (Stanton, 11/28)

Citing Washington Post reporting and a federal lawsuit, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal are accusing one of the nation’s largest anesthesiology firms of unfair business methods and requesting information from the firm about its prices, executive salaries, payouts to investors and acquisition of competitors. “USAP has engaged in anticompetitive practices that appeared to be designed to jack up prices and suck up as much profit as possible, with detrimental effects to patients and doctors,” Warren (D-Mass.) and Blumenthal (D-Conn.) wrote in a letter sent on Sunday to Robert Coward, the company’s chief executive. (Whoriskey, 11/27)