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 “A startling number” of people, 78,000 a year, are treated in U.S.
hospitals for firearm injuries, said lead author Dr. Faiz Gani in a
phone interview.
The new report in Health Affairs calculates the price tag for
firearm injuries: $2.8 billion a year in American hospital charges
and $46 billion a year in lost work and medical care.
“There’s a large clinical and financial burden here, and we really
need to do something about it,” said Gani, a postdoctoral research
fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland.
Scientific, research-driven public policy might prevent shooting
massacres like this week’s at a Las Vegas country music festival, he
said.
Government-funded research has led to lifesaving interventions to
prevent other injuries. It inspired laws mandating automobile seat
belts and air bags, for example. But Congress has essentially choked
off federal funding for scientific studies of firearms-injury
prevention since 1996.
“Horrific mass killings receive the most media attention, but as can
be seen by the numbers, they only represent a small portion of the
total costs - human and medical - of gun injuries in the United
States,” said David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control
Research Center in Boston, who was not involved with the study.
Gani and colleagues analyzed a nationally representative sample of
patients who arrived alive in U.S. hospital emergency departments
with firearm-related injuries from 2006 through 2014.
More than 700,000 people sought care in emergency rooms for gunshot
wounds during the nine years, they estimated.
Males were nine times more likely than females to be victims of
gunshot injuries, and men ages 20 to 24 were at the highest risk,
the study found.
The study did not collect information about race/ethnicity.
Unintentional shootings led to more than one-third of the non-fatal
firearm injuries, the authors found.
“Unintentional shootings are often presented as a minor problem -
they are not,” Hemenway said by email.
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The new study reveals gaping holes in our understanding of gunshot
injuries. Researchers could not determine, for example, what kind of
weapon was used in nearly two-thirds of the cases because the
information was unrecorded.
In 1996, researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) reported in The New England Journal of Medicine
that people who kept guns in their homes faced a nearly three-fold
greater risk of homicide and a nearly five-fold greater risk of
suicide. In response, Jay Dickey, an Arkansas Republican who
described himself as the National Rifle Association’s “point person
in Congress,” submitted an amendment to strip the CDC budget of $2.6
million, the amount it spent on firearms research the previous year.
The so-called Dickey Amendment has since then almost entirely
stopped federal funding of firearms research.
Before he died this year, Dickey had a change of heart. In 2012, he
and Mark Rosenberg, who directed the CDC when the Dickey Amendment
was approved, co-authored a Washington Post editorial calling for
scientific research to prevent firearm injuries. (http://wapo.st/2fRfuII)
“We were on opposite sides of the heated battle 16 years ago, but we
are in strong agreement now that scientific research should be
conducted into preventing firearm injuries and that ways to prevent
firearm deaths can be found without encroaching on the rights of
legitimate gun owners,” they wrote.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2wQ1IZ8 Health Affairs, online October 2,
2017.
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