Gun violence costs America $229 billion a year

A sobering investigation from Mother Jones found that gun violence costs $700 per American per year. Gun violence's total $229 billion price tag is more than the cost of obesity ($224 billion), and almost as much as the cost of Medicaid ($251 billion).

How did Mother Jones come up with that $229 billion figure? Well, relatively little of it — just $8.6 billion — is direct costs such as prison for people who commit homicides using guns. The bulk is all "indirect costs" — including $169 billion for the "impact on victims' quality of life," and $49 billion a year in lost wages.

In the past 10 years, at least 750,000 Americans have been injured by gunshots, and more than 320,000 have been killed, Mother Jones reports. More than 20,000 people commit suicide each year using guns, and more than 11,000 people are murdered by firearms each year.

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Check out the full report over at Mother Jones.