An average of 200 people in America sustain gun injuries every day, one in six of them children or teens, a gun-control group’s new study shows. Vice reported that the study by Everytown for Gun Safety, a group funded by former New York mayor and potential presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, takes aim at a vacuum in federal policy-making created by a lack of federal data on gun injuries.
The study finds that while more than 36,000 people are killed annually by firearms in America, more than 73,000 are injured each year. Everytown gathered its data from 30 million discharge records from 950 hospitals and emergency rooms over three years. The research counters the notion that gun violence is an inner-city problem. There are similar nonfatal injuries in rural and urban communities alike. Half of the bullet and shrapnel wounds in the three-year period they studied occurred in the South. The Everytown study quantifies how research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention falls short. While the CDC did release data on nonfatal gun injuries for 2015, 2016, and 2017, its data came from a survey of just 2 percent of U.S. hospitals, which experts considered inadequate. Everytown widened the research to 16 times more institutions.