Michael Conroy / AP
A single bouquet of flower sits in the rocks across the street from the FedEx facility in Indianapolis, Saturday, April 17, 2021 where eight people were shot and killed. A gunman killed eight people and wounded several others before apparently taking his own life in a late-night attack at a FedEx facility near the Indianapolis airport, police said, in the latest in a spate of mass shootings in the United States after a relative lull during the pandemic.
Wednesday, April 21, 2021 | 2 a.m.
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In the 36 days since the March 16 mass shooting in Atlanta, 45 others have occurred. Think about that — the U.S. is averaging more than one shooting per day in which four or more people are shot and either wounded or killed.
But while those shootings garner widespread attention for obvious reasons, they’re actually just one symptom of a national crisis whose underlying effects include draining families’ incomes on medical bills for hospitalizations, costing Americans billions of dollars in wages, reducing work productivity and burdening many families with the costs of long-term care for severely injured victims.
A recent report from the Harvard Kennedy School, the public policy school for the prestigious Ivy League university, offered a compilation of studies that puts the crisis into sharp focus. Among the sobering findings by various researchers:
• The cost of emergency room visits and inpatient admissions stemming from firearm injuries amounts to nearly $3 billion per year.
• More than 40% of firearm injury patients seeking emergency room care are uninsured, use public insurance or opt to pay their bills out of pocket. According to Health Affairs, a leading health policy publication, either these individuals bear the entire burden of their bills “or these costs remain unrecovered — thereby adding to the uncompensated care provided by hospitals, physicians and health care systems.”
• Care for gunshot wounds is costly: The average emergency room visit costs $5,254, and the average for inpatient treatment skyrockets to $95,887.
• Annually, firearms injuries result in $50 billion in lost wages during recovery and reduced incomes afterward. One reason the number is so high is that young adults have the highest firearm injury rates, and those who are debilitated will miss out on decades of work or suffer reduced earning potential due to their injuries.
• The $50 billion in losses to families also includes income spent on providing in-home care, or the equivalent cost of providing that care themselves for free.
• Firearm injuries cost American businesses $1.4 million per day in productivity, revenue and costs to recruit and train employees to fill vacated positions.
• The Journal of Pediatric Surgery reported in 2020 that 13,596 children were admitted to hospitals for firearms injuries from 2010 to 2014, resulting in $382 million in total costs of hospitalization. The journal further estimated that those injuries to children cost parents and guardians $38 million in lost income as they took time off from work to care for the young victims.
These figures are one sign of the heavy toll that America’s glut of firearms and shamefully weak gun safety policies have taken on the public. Guns are not just a public health emergency, but a significant economic problem as well.
No wonder that in poll after poll, a majority of respondents support tighter gun laws such as expanded background checks and bans on sales of assault weapons. Americans are tired of the daily horrors of mass shootings, the spiraling financial impact of gun violence on families and the ongoing resistance among members of the Republican Party to accept any and all reasonable and responsible gun-safety measures.
In a nation where 300 people are shot and more than 100 die each day, the public opinion is that it’s long past time to address our epidemic of gun violence.
Fortunately, level-headed leaders in Washington and Nevada are listening to Americans and trying to move the ball forward. That includes President Joe Biden, who last week announced steps that included efforts to curb the proliferation of so-called ghost guns, or home-assembled weapons made from components without serial numbers, and to create a national model for state-level red flag laws that allow authorities to confiscate weapons from individuals who have been legally deemed a threat to themselves and others.
But with the U.S. flooded with an estimated 400 million guns and still plagued by policies that enrich gun manufacturers at the expense of the well-being of Americans, it’s critical for reforms to continue.
