The cost of gun violence

We in the United States live in a gun culture. This is, we live amid a plethora of guns and people with guns—so much so that it had become unsurprising when we hear about someone being shot, either by intent, by accident or self-inflicted.

But what is the cost of such gun violence? Interestingly, while the U.S. government has assessed the economic toll of various problems, such as motor vehicle crashes, air pollution, heart disease and domestic violence, it has not collected data on the costs of gun violence. Why not?

According to “What Does Gun Violence Really Cost?” (Mother Jones, May/June) by Mark Follman, Julia Lurie, Jaeah Lee and Ted Miller, “the National Rifle Association and other influential gun rights advocates have long pressured political leaders to shut down research related to firearms.”

 

 

An April 7 editorial in the Annals of Internal Medicine called this “suppression of science.” It noted that “polictical forces had effectively banned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other scientific agencies from funding research on gun-related injury and death.” This suppression worked, since no relevant studies have been published since 2005.

Not to be deterred by such influence, Mother Jones set to work investigating this question in 2012. The article goes into detail about what these writers learned. For example, in the last decade, more than 750,000 Americans were injured by gunshots, and more than 320,000 were killed. Each year, more than 11,000 people are murdered with a firearm, and more than 20,000 others commit suicide using one. In addition, “hundreds of children die annually in gun homicides, and each week seems to bring news of another toddler accidently shooting himself or a sibling with an unsecured gun,” write the authors. And while “violent crime overall has declined steadily in recent years, rates of gun injury and death are climbing (up 11 and 4 percent since 2011), and mass shootings have been on the rise.”

As the editorial by a team of doctors in Annals of Internal Medicine said: “It does not matter whether we believe that guns kill people or that people kill people with guns—the result is the same: a public health crisis.”

The writers in Mother Jones have not accumulated a lot of data, they also tell a half dozen stories of specific individuals affected by gun violence and the approximate costs to them and to society (i.e., taxpayers). Such stories help bring the statistics home, make them real.

To help get a hold of the economic toll of gun violence, Mother Jones turned to Ted Miller at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, an independent nonprofit that studies public health, education and safety issues.

Miller looks at two categories of costs: direct and indirect. “Every time a bullet hits somebody, expenses can include emergency services, police investigations and long-term medical and mental-health care, as well as court and prison costs.” These are direct costs, and about 87 percent of them fall on taxpayers.

Indirect costs include “lost income, losses to employers and impact on quality of life, which Miller bases on amounts that juries award for pain and suffering to victims of wrongful injury and death.”

Mother Jones crunched data from 2012 and found that “the annual cost of gun violence in America exceeds $229 billion.” Direct costs account for $8.6 billion, which means “the average cost to taxpayers for a single gun homicide in America is nearly $400,000. And we pay for 32 of them every single day.”

Our gun culture, which places a high value on owning guns, is expensive.