Guns—Injuries and Fatalities - What Is Known About Firearms Injuries?

Data on gunshot injuries and firearm-related deaths for the period 1993 to 1997 were collected from victim surveys, hospital emergency room surveillance, and government entities such as the National Center for Health Statistics (death certificates), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) (reported homicides), and the CDC (firearms injury studies) for the report Firearm Injury and Death from Crime, 1993–97 (U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Selected Findings, October 2000). The authors noted that efforts to count injuries were complicated by limitations such as the failure of some sources to provide data on victims who later died, or the inability of other sources to make estimates because of too few cases reported. The authors estimated that there were 19.2 million incidents of nonfatal violent crime committed from 1993 through 1997, excluding simple assault. Table 6.1 presents some of the data from the report. The following are highlights:

• Of serious nonfatal violent victimizations, 28% were committed with a firearm, 4% resulted in serious injury, and 1% resulted in gunshot wounds.
• Assault accounted for 62% of the 411,800 nonfatal firearm-related injuries treated in emergency departments. (See Table 6.1.) Of 180,533 firearm-related fatalities, 44% were homicides and 51% were suicides.
• Gunshot wounds from assaults treated in emergency departments fell by 39%, from 64,100 in 1993 to 39,400 in 1997. (See Table 6.1.) Homicides committed with a firearm declined by 27%, from 18,253 in 1993 to 13,252 in 1997.
• Four of five victims of both fatal and nonfatal gunshot wounds from crime were male. About half were African-American males, and about half of those were between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four. About one in five victims of nonfatal gunshot wounds from crime was Hispanic.

FIGURE 6.1

• More than 50% of victims of nonfatal gunshot wounds from crime were younger than twenty-five, while older victims were more common in gun-related homicides.

Of all victims of nonfatal firearm injury who were treated in emergency departments, more than half were hospitalized overnight. Most of the nonfatal incidents occurred during the commission of a crime (assault or homicide, or legal intervention, which means injuries inflicted by the police in the course of arresting or attempting to arrest lawbreakers).

A 2002 study carried out by the HELP Network, Disabilities from Guns: The Untold Costs of Spinal Cord and Traumatic Brain Injuries (Chicago: The HELP Network, 2002), examined the consequences of nonfatal firearm injuries and underscored "the critical need for a national, centralized data collection system to track their long-term after-effects." Figure 6.1 tracks the number of firearm fatalities in the United States from 1968 to 2000, and Table 6.2 reports the firearm deaths and rates as well as the estimated nonfatal firearm injuries reported to emergency departments during the same period. A comparison of the number of fatal and nonfatal firearm injuries from 1994 to 1999 is found in Figure 6.2. The graph shows a gradual decline in both areas over the five-year period.

Table 6.3 presents data on the number of fatal and nonfatal injuries amongst men and women in the United States in 2001. The table breaks down the data into such categories as sex, intent (accidental or intentional), and method of death and also provides the case fatality rate for each category. (Case fatality rate is a comparison of how often an injury is fatal versus nonfatal; a higher number indicates a greater proportion of fatalities.) For 2001, unintentional firearm injuries had an 8.4 fatality rate, while intentional firearm injuries had a fatality rate of 24.7 and self-inflicted wounds had a fatality rate of 85.