Young shooting victims mostly boys
Assault, not accident, blamed for about half
You can see the toll of gun violence on America’s children in hospital records from around the country.
Researchers from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine published their results Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.
Faiz Gani and Joseph Canner of the school’s Surgery Center for Outcomes Research scoured data from the Nationwide Emergency Department Sample, the largest database of hospital ER visits in the country. They tallied more than 75,000 children sent to ERs for treatment of gun-related injuries between the beginning of 2006 and the end of 2014. Then they adjusted the data to make it representative of the nation as a whole.
Gani and Canner found that for every 100,000 Americans under 18, 11.3 went to a hospital ER after being shot. This figure represents the average incidence of firearm-related ER visits over the nine years of the study.
The average age of these gunshot victims was 14.8 years and the overwhelming majority — 86.2 percent — were male.
Overall, 6 percent of pediatric shooting victims who came to the ER died of their injuries, the researchers found.
Nearly half — 49 percent — of the young patients brought to ERs with gunrelated injuries were shot during intentional assaults. Another 39 percent were victims of accidents involving firearms, and 2 percent attempted suicide with a gun.
American kids faced the highest risk of a serious firearm injury at the start of the study period, with 15.1 out of every 100,000 minors seeking ER treatment for a gunshot wound in 2006. That figure fell steadily until 2011, when 9.5 out of every 100,000 minors went to the ER after being shot.
After rising slightly in 2012, gun-related trips to the ER bottomed out in 2013 at 7.5 cases per 100,000 kids. It then jumped back to 10.1 cases per 100,000 in 2014.
Throughout the study period, boys were at least five times more likely than girls to require ER treatment for a gun-inflicted wound.
The group that experienced the greatest burden of gun-related injuries was young men between the ages of 15 and 17, with 85.9 out of every 100,000 taken to an ER to be treated for a gunshot wound.
Among all minors seen in ERs with firearm-related injuries, 35 percent were admitted. About 1 of 15 of those admitted — or 6.6 percent — died as a result of their injuries.
In addition, 3.6 percent of the kids who came to the ER after being shot died before they could be admitted, researchers found.
The cost of treating these children in the emergency department totaled $259 million over the nine years of the study. Those who required further treatment as inpatients racked up a whopping $2.2 billion in hospital bills.
In other words, the overall cost of caring for kids who had been shot was an average of about $270 million per year.