The High Cost of Gunfire

It’s not always clear who benefits from the almost unlimited access of Americans to firearms, but it is clear now who pays most of the costs for the tens of thousands of injuries that the easy availability of guns makes possible. A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. puts the annual national cost for hospitalizations from firearm wounds at $429 million, with fully 85.6% of that coming from public sources. The study was based on records for 1984. Given the inflation in medical-care costs since then, more than 40%, this year’s hospitalization bill almost certainly will be closer to $600 million.

Even this figure significantly understates the total medical costs for firearm injuries. Add in the costs of ambulance services, physicians’ fees, readmissions, ambulatory-care follow-up visits, physical therapy, rehabilitation services and long-term care, and the estimated costs rise to more than $1 billion, the study’s authors say. Additional indirect costs--lost work time, disability payments, legal fees--probably double that amount.

Hospital costs for gunshot victims in 1984 ranged from $559 to $64,470. The average cost was $6,915, while the average period of hospitalization was 6.2 days. Major public sources of payment include Medicaid, the Medically Indigent Adult Program, Medicare and the jail system. A further public source, more than 18% of costs, came in debt written off by hospitals. That’s the kind of debt that raises everyone’s hospital bills.

The article in the AMA Journal carries the reminder that there were 31,351 deaths from firearm injuries in 1984, with double that number of hospitalizations. More than one-third of those deaths were homicides. In more than 81% of cases in which hospitalization occurred, handguns were the source of the injuries.

What’s to be concluded from this study? “When considering laws that would restrict the availability of firearms,” its authors write, “elected officials must be aware that the issue is not simply one of individual rights, since taxpayers pay most of the costs associated with firearm injuries.”

Most politicians, not to put too fine a point on it, tend to be scared out of their wits at the thought of imposing even the most modest controls on firearms, lest they attract the wrath of the gun lobby. Now, for the first time, politicians and taxpayers have been given a sense of what this criminally absurd degree of tolerance is costing the public.