A new study has revealed that about 20 children a day are checked into United States hospitals for gunshot wounds.
Researchers from the Yale School of Medicine pored over hospital records from the Kids' Inpatient Database for the probe. They found firearms led to hospitalizations of 7,391 children younger than 20 years old in 2009, according to a report from Dr. John Leventhal, who headed up the study.
"Three firearms-related patients each day are younger than 15 years of age," Leventhal told HealthDay. "This is a tragedy. There are substantial injuries to these children that may have lifelong consequences."
Of those gun violence victims, 453 died at the medical facilities, according to HealthDay.
At least half of the hospitalizations involved a child who'd been wounded by a firearm, but almost one-third of those cases were said to be unintentional. Additionally, three out of four of the accidental injuries happened to children younger than 10.
Leventhal, who works as a professor of pediatrics and medical director of the Yale-New Haven Children's Hospital Child Abuse Program, also told HealthDay that nine out of ten times, it was a boy who was hospitalized with gunshot wounds. Black males checked into hospitals with gunshot wounds at 10 times the rate of white males.
Nearly 84 percent of these cases involved teenagers between the ages of 15 and 19. Two thirds of those cases were assault-based, Leventhal said, adding that some of these injuries could be due to gang violence.
"Some of these are school shootings, some are gang-related, some are related to fights or disagreements," he told HealthDay. "They all relate to access to guns."
Around 15 percent of kids checked into the hospital in 2009 sustained lifelong injuries, including traumatic brain injury, or spinal cord injuries.
"Those don't necessarily heal," Leventhal stated. "Those children will struggle with these injuries for the rest of their lives."
Executive director of the American Public Health Association Dr. Georges Benjamin said these numbers shed light on the importance of gun safety.
"People have firearms at home for a variety of reasons," he said. "Some people think they are safer with them, but evidence shows that's not the case. Far too often, there was a firearm under a mattress of a parent who put a firearm up high in the closet, way in the back - but that's exactly where a child will look."
