As guns rise to leading cause of death among US children, research funding to help prevent and protect victims lags

Deidre McPhillips

CNN.org

Originally posted 7 Feb 24

More children die from guns than anything else in the United States, but relatively little funding is available to study how to prevent these tragedies.

From 2008 to 2017, about $12 million in federal research awards were granted to study pediatric firearm mortality each year – about $600 per life lost, according to a study published in Health Affairs. Motor vehicle crashes, the leading cause of death among children at the time, received about $26,000 of research funding per death, while funding to study pediatric cancer, the third leading cause of death, topped $195,000 per death.

By 2020, firearm deaths in the US had reached record levels and guns had surpassed car crashes to become the leading cause of death among children. More than 4,300 children and teens died from guns in 2020, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – a 27% jump from 2017, and a number that has only continued to rise. But federal dollars haven’t followed proportionately.

Congress has earmarked about $25 million for firearm injury prevention research each year since 2020, split evenly between the CDC and the National Institutes of Health. Even if all of those dollars were spent on studies focused on pediatric deaths from firearm injury, it’d still be less than $6,000 per death.

The info is here.

The article highlights the critical need for increased research funding to prevent firearm-related deaths among children and teens in the U.S. Despite guns becoming the leading cause of death in this demographic, research funding remains insufficient. This lack of investment hinders the development of life-saving solutions and policies to address gun violence effectively. To protect our youth and combat this pressing issue, substantial and sustained funding for research on gun violence prevention is imperative.

Or, we could have more sensible gun laws to protect children and adolescents.

Suicide Risk Increases Immediately After Gun Purchase

Psychiatric News Alert
Originally published 11 June 20

A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine expands on past research on the association between access to guns and suicide, finding that handgun ownership is associated with an elevated risk of suicide by firearm, particularly immediately after the gun is acquired.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, gun sales have sharply increased, an accompanying commentary pointed out. In March, Americans bought nearly two million guns, marking the second-highest monthly total since 1998, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began publishing such data.

“How will the current surge of gun purchases affect firearm-related violence?” wrote Chana A. Sacks, M.D., M.P.H., and Stephen J. Bartels, M.D., in their commentary. “With an additional 2 million guns now in households across the country at a time of widespread unemployment, social isolation, and acute national stress that is unprecedented in our lifetime, we urgently need to find out.”

Lead author David M. Studdert, LL.B., Sc.D., of the Stanford Law School and School of Medicine and colleagues tracked firearm ownership and mortality over 12 years (2004-2016) among 26.3 million adults in California. They used the California Statewide Voter Registration Database to form the cohort, as the database updates its information on registered voters in the state every year.

The researchers then used the California Department of Justice’s Dealer Record of Sale for details on which cohort members acquired handguns and when. Additionally, the California Death Statistical Master Files provided records of all deaths reported during the study period.

The alert is here.

Childhood Firearm Injuries in the United States

Katherine A. Fowler, Linda L. Dahlberg, Tadesse Haileyesus, Carmen Gutierrez, Sarah Bacon
Pediatrics
July 2017, VOLUME 140 / ISSUE 1

RESULTS: Nearly 1300 children die and 5790 are treated for gunshot wounds each year. Boys, older children, and minorities are disproportionately affected. Although unintentional firearm deaths among children declined from 2002 to 2014 and firearm homicides declined from 2007 to 2014, firearm suicides decreased between 2002 and 2007 and then showed a significant upward trend from 2007 to 2014. Rates of firearm homicide among children are higher in many Southern states and parts of the Midwest relative to other parts of the country. Firearm suicides are more dispersed across the United States with some of the highest rates occurring in Western states. Firearm homicides of younger children often occurred in multivictim events and involved intimate partner or family conflict; older children more often died in the context of crime and violence. Firearm suicides were often precipitated by situational and relationship problems. The shooter playing with a gun was the most common circumstance surrounding unintentional firearm deaths of both younger and older children.


CONCLUSIONS: Firearm injuries are an important public health problem, contributing substantially to premature death and disability of children. Understanding their nature and impact is a first step toward prevention.

The article is here.

Physicians, Firearms, and Free Speech

Wendy E. Parmet, Jason A. Smith, and Matthew Miller
N Engl J Med 2017; 376:1901-1903
May 18, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

The majority’s well-reasoned decision, in fact, does just that. By relying on heightened rather than strict scrutiny, the majority affirmed that laws regulating physician speech must be designed to enhance rather than harm patient safety. The majority took this mandate seriously and required the state to show some meaningful evidence that the regulation was apt to serve the state’s interest in protecting patients.

The state could not do so for two reasons. First, the decision to keep a gun in the home substantially increases the risk of death for all household members, especially the risk of death by suicide, and particularly so when guns are stored loaded and unlocked, as they are in millions of homes where children live.  Second, the majority of U.S. adults who live in homes with guns are unaware of the heightened risk posed by bringing guns into a home.  Indeed, by providing accurate information about the risks created by easy access to firearms, as well as ways to modify that risk (e.g., by storing guns unloaded and locked up, separate from ammunition), a physician’s counseling can not only enhance a patient’s capacity for self-determination, but also save lives.

Given the right to provide such counsel, professional norms recognize the responsibility to do so. Fulfilling this obligation, however, may not be easy, since the chief impediments to doing so — and to doing so effectively — are not and never have been legal barriers. Indeed, the court’s welcome ruling does not ensure that most clinicians will honor this hard-won victory by exercising their First Amendment rights.

The article is here.

Florida Doctors May Discuss Guns With Patients, Court Rules

 Lizette Alvarez
The New York Times
Originally posted February

Here is an excerpt:

A federal appeals court cleared the way on Thursday for Florida doctors to talk to their patients about gun safety, overturning a 2011 law that pitted medical providers against the state's powerful gun lobby.

In its 10-to-1 ruling, the full panel of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit concluded that doctors could not be threatened with losing their license for asking patients if they owned guns and for discussing gun safety because to do so would violate their free speech.

"Florida does not have carte blanche to restrict the speech of doctors and medical professionals on a certain subject without satisfying the demands of heightened scrutiny," the majority wrote in its decision. In its lawsuit, the medical community argued that questions about gun storage were crucial to public health because of the relationship between firearms and both the suicide rate and the gun-related deaths of children.

A number of doctors and medical organizations sued Florida in a case that came to be known as Docs v. Glocks, after the popular handgun.

The article is here.

Why Suicide Keeps Rising for Middle-Aged Men

By Lisa Esposito
US News and World Report
Originally published Oct. 19, 2016

Suicide rates in the U.S. continue to rise, and working-age adults – particularly men – make up the largest increase, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Middle-aged men in the 45 to 60 range experienced a 43 percent increase in suicide deaths from 1997 to 2014, and the rise has been even sharper since 2005. Untreated mental illness, the Great Recession, work-related issues and men's reluctance to reach out for help converge to put them at greater risk for taking their own lives. And because men are more likely than women to use a gun, their suicide attempts are more often fatal.

Historically, suicide rates have always been higher for men, says Dr. Alex Crosby, surveillance branch chief in the CDC's Division of Violence Prevention. "But what we've seen in these past few years is rates have been going up among males and females," he told journalists attending a National Press Foundation conference in September. "Still, rates are higher among males – about four times higher." For suicide attempts that don't prove fatal, the balance changes, with two to three times more females than males trying to take their own lives.

"In about half of the suicides in the United States, the mechanism or the method was a firearm," Crosby says. Males are more likely to use firearms, while poison is more common for females. However, he notes, "When you look at suicide in the military, females choose firearms almost as much as men."

The article is here.

Will America Pass the Test of Morality in 2016?

By Marian Wright Edelman
The Milwaukee Courier
Originally posted January 9, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

We are better than this. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German Protestant theologian who died opposing Hitler’s holocaust, believed the test of the morality of society is how it treats its children. We flunk Bonhoeffer’s test every hour and every day in America, as we let the violence of guns and the violence of poverty relentlessly sap countless child lives. A child or teenager is killed by a gun every three and a half hours, nearly 7 a day, 48 a week.

More than 15.5 million children are poor and children are the poorest age group in America – the world’s largest economy, and the younger the children are, the poorer they are. Children of color, already the majority of our youngest children, will be the majority of our children in 2020.

The article is here.

Texas allows guns into state mental health hospitals

By Rick Jervis
USA TODAY
Originally published January 8, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

Visitors to one of Texas' 10 state mental health hospitals will be allowed to openly carry weapons into the facilities, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. Employees and patients will still be barred from bringing in weapons. The hospitals this week pulled down signs banning guns at its facilities and posted new ones asking people to leave their firearms in their cars or conceal them from patients, said Carrie Williams, a state health department spokeswoman.

“While licensed visitors are legally permitted to carry on our hospital campuses, our patients are being actively treated for psychiatric conditions and generally it’s best not to expose them to weapons of any kind.,” Williams said in statement.

The article is here.

Under Gun Rules, FBI Will Receive Health Data

By Robert Pear
The New York Times
Originally posted January 6, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

Virtually every push for new gun sale restrictions in recent years has been greeted by opponents countering with proposals to address mental health as a factor in gun violence.

“For those in Congress who so often rush to blame mental illness for mass shootings as a way of avoiding action on guns, here’s your chance to support these efforts,” Mr. Obama said at the White House on Tuesday.

But that challenge moved the administration into a thicket of difficult health questions. Under a rule published Wednesday in the Federal Register, the background check system run by the Federal Bureau of Investigation will receive the names of people who are forbidden to buy or own firearms because they have been involuntarily committed to a mental institution or found to pose a danger to themselves or others.

The article is here.