Bullets and American Teens

The spike in gun sales after any major serial killing continues to stun me. The NRA-right-wing mantra “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” is so completely statistically out of whack as to be ludicrous… but it is a sacred belief to NRA adherents. That for every justifiable gun homicide there are 30 that are not seems to fall on deaf ears. That how to detect when a “good guy” might become a “bad guy” or that guns are so pervasive that even the “worst guy” can find a sophisticated multi-shot gun are matters without answers. That there is no reason to own semi-automatic assault weapons with oversized magazines except to kill a significant volume of human beings in the shortest time possible draws nothing more than a “damn you liberal” yawn from NRA supporters.

We see hate groups with members with “open carry” weapons strapped to their waists in states that permit such inane bravado. It’s bad when religious and ethnic killing mirror WWII Nazi executions, but apparently, we have equal disdain when it comes to watching as our children die from gun violence that increasingly defines life in inner city America. When schools or children are sprayed by a mass-killer’s bullets, from Sandy Hook to Columbine to Parkland, that NRA fanatics believe more guns in schools, in the hands of teachers, are a realistic solution is an amazing act of denial of statistical reality. According to the NRA, there are over 15 million AR-15 semi-automatic rifles in civilian hands in this country. Cops are facing increasingly sophisticated weapons as they respond to a growing litany of assaults. Still, there is a right-wing cry for more guns in civilian hands.

The October 30^th Los Angeles Times presents some pretty stark statistics that migrate beyond mass killings to guns deaths against American children in general: You can see the toll of gun violence on America’s kids by studying hospital records from around the country. And when you do, you’ll see that it’s large — and it appears to be rising… [R]esearchers from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine… published their results Monday [10/29] 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 emergency-room visits across the country…They tallied more than 75,000 children who were sent to ERs seeking treatment for 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 the age of 18, 11.3 went to a hospital emergency room 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% — were male…Overall, 6% of pediatric shooting victims who came to the ER died of their injuries, the researchers found… Nearly half — 49% — of the young patients brought to hospital emergency departments with gun-related injuries were shot during intentional assaults. Another 39% of patients were victims of accidents involving firearms, and 2% 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, the incidence of gun-related trips to the emergency room 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.

This trend was most pronounced for boys. Throughout the study period, boys were at least five times more likely than girls to require emergency-room treatment for a gun-inflicted wound.

The incidence of these injuries among boys was 26.1 per 100,000 in 2006, then fell to 12.3 per 100,000 in 2013 before rising back to 16.5 per 100,000 in 2014. The incidence for girls remained between 2.4 and 4 cases per 100,000 throughout the nine years of the study.

The group that experienced the greatest burden of gun-related injuries was young men ages 15 to 17. For this unfortunate cohort, 85.9 out of every 100,000 were taken to an emergency room to be treated for a gunshot wound.

Among all minors seen in ERs with firearm-related injuries, 35% were hurt badly enough to be admitted to the hospital. About 1 out of 15 of these admitted patients — or 6.6% — died as a result of their injuries… In addition, 3.6% of the kids who came to the ER after being shot died before they could be admitted, the researchers found.

The cost of treating all 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 about $270 million per year, on average.

Costs? If that’s all you care about. We lose untold hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in global tourism because we are looked upon, with justification, as a gun-crazy nation, saturated with over three hundred million guns in civilian hands, and an attitude that all-too-often places gun ownership as more important than keeping our children safe. But the human cost is so much more than dollars. That we are alone among nations, not gripped by war or civil war, with these deadly statistics hasn’t moved the political needle towards gun control. And our increasingly very-right-wing-shifting Supreme Court is likely to amp up that killing trend with attacks on even the most sensible gun control.

I’m Peter Dekom, and common sense seems so very uncommon in this country when it comes to protecting our own children from gun violence.