It’s no secret that mass shootings are getting deadlier in the United States, but a new study from Johns Hopkins University medical school proves that more should be done for prevention.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins’ have breached a new study, discovering that over the past nine years, 75,000 people under age 18 have been hospitalized due to gun injuries.
According to AP, 11 of every 100,000 children that turn up in U.S. emergency rooms have gun-related injuries, amounting to nearly 8,300 children annually. Half of the injuries come from assaults—like school shootings. Forty percent of the gun-inflicted injuries are unintentional and 2 percent are suicide.
Sadly, the study doesn’t even account for kids who are injured or killed by guns that don’t show up at the hospital.
Dr. Faiz Gani, lead author and researcher at Johns Hopkins, said: “I don’t know what more we need to see in the world to be able to come together and tackle this problem.”
Researchers say this is the first nationally representative study on American children’s gunshot-related ER visits. According to the AP, pediatric visits for gun-related injuries fell from a rate of about 15 per 100,000 in 2006 to to 7 per 100,000 in 2013, but has been steadily climbing in recent years, up to about 10 per 100,000 today.
