Half of child gun violence victims were 'intentionally' shot, study shows

More than 75,000 children in the U.S. ended up in the emergency room between 2006 and 2014 after being shot. Half of them wound up there because they were intentionally attacked.

The Los Angeles Times reports that 11.3 of every 100,000 American children were shot and went to an emergency room during those nine years. And that number only appears to be growing, said the Times, citing a Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine study published Monday.

The average age of the children sent to emergency rooms after being shot was just 14.8 years old, the study found. But just 39 percent of these incidents were accidents, while another 49 percent were "intentional assaults," the Times notes. The rate of children being shot was at its highest in 2006 and fell until 2011, but then rose again each year until the study's data collection ended in 2014.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

An "overwhelming majority" of these gunshot victims were male, and especially likely to be between the ages of 15 and 17, the Times reports. And overall, 6.6 percent of all young gunshot victims ended up dying of their injuries, the study found. Treating these victims cost an average of $270 million per year, with patients who required additional hospital care accruing the largest costs. The study only drew from data collected in hospitals, so there's no telling how patients' health is affected in the long term, or how much money they spend on recovery once they're discharged. Read more about the study at the Los Angeles Times.