It feels right to me. People are being injured, maimed, permanently disabled, and killed. All by a particular piece of readily available technology. When we can point to the single thing that causes all those individual health emergencies, and it’s consistently happening across the country on a daily basis to many many people, in public spaces that are otherwise quite safe, that’s most definitely a public health crisis.
If you look at gun violence the way you look at disease I'm sure there are correllaries. Cycles of one person inflicting pain on a group, and that group transmitting that pain back onto a different group.