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INJURY CONTROL Child Firearm Deaths Tied to Gun AvailabilityA study from the Harvard Injury Control Research Center at HSPH finds a striking association between the level of gun ownership in a state and the number of violent deaths among children due to homicide, suicide, and firearm accidents.
A recent HSPH study shows that the number of suicides, homicides, and unintentional deaths by firearms (red) increases according to firearm prevalence. The number of non-firearm homicides and suicides (purple), however, remains constant, so the corresponding rise in all violent deaths (black) in these states is due entirely to firearm deaths. It is rare that raw numbers are illustrative enough to grace the cover of a journal, but the Journal of Trauma featured a table from the study on the cover of its February issue, demonstrating the stark difference in firearm deaths among children in states with the highest and lowest levels of gun availability. Children aged 5 to 14 living in one of the five high-gun states were twice as likely to commit suicide or to be murdered, three times as likely to die from firearm homicide, seven times as likely to die from firearm suicide, and 16 times as likely to die from a firearm-related accident. The study suggests the higher death rates are largely related to gun availability and are not due to difference in levels of poverty, education, or urbanization in these states. The larger goal of the center is to understand the causes and risk factors of injuries, especially among vulnerable populations like children. Firearms are the third leading cause of death among children in the U.S., behind motor vehicle accidents and cancer. However, there is very little data about the risks that firearms pose and how those risks can be reduced. "This study is the first to show that guns really put children at a higher risk of dying," said senior author David Hemenway, HSPH professor of health policy and director of the center.
A study led by Matthew Miller found that in states where more guns are available, children are more likely to be victims of firearm-related deaths. Photo by Steve Gilbert The numbers in the table show the extremes of gun ownership and associated child firearm deaths, but the team also found a consistent link between gun availability and these deaths across all states. Furthermore, while states with high gun levels had higher rates of violent deaths, the level of non-gun-related deaths did not differ significantly, suggesting that firearms are playing a critical role. "Where there are more guns, there are more kids who are actually dying violent deaths," said Matthew Miller, associate director of the center and the study's lead author. "It is not merely that they're choosing to use guns instead of other weapons, it's that there's an excess of death where there are more guns." Fingering FirearmsSince gathering information on firearm use is a challenge because of a lack of data collection systems, the team relied on several different measures of gun ownership. Census data is available at the regional level from questionnaires that ask a large sampling of people whether they own guns. This is the most direct indicator of gun ownership, but its use is limited because it covers the nine census regions but not individual states. At the state level, firearm ownership levels were gauged using one survey measure of household firearm ownership (available for 21 of the 50 states) and two proxies: Cook's index, an average of the percentages of homicides and suicides by firearms in a state and the proportion of all suicides that involve firearms. These proxies have been validated against survey estimates of firearm ownership across counties, census regions, and states.The correlation they found cannot prove a causal relationship, so the team then controlled for some conditions that could influence firearm death rates--poverty, education, and urbanization--but found that none of them could explain the differences in violent death rates. "Guns seem to be driving the relationship," Miller said. The Role of GunsOne of the arguments against linking fatalities to gun ownership is reverse causation: perhaps people living in unsafe areas tend to buy more guns to protect themselves. Miller points out that this argument would apply only to homicide but not suicide or firearm accidents since those are not responses to violence. Even if other factors are involved, the ready availability of guns is likely causing fatalities among children rather than protecting them. Other studies from the center have poked holes in the notion that guns are being used protectively. A survey found that far more gun use is aggressive than defensive, and what is called defensive is actually often hostile or illegal.According to Miller, the danger of guns is not that they somehow cause people to act more violently--it is simply that people will be far more successful at killing themselves or someone else with a gun. "We see this in international studies," he pointed out. Forty percent of U.S. households own guns, and American children are far more likely to die from firearms than children in other industrialized countries. However, the overall violent crime rate in the U.S. is not much different from that in other countries. "What distinguishes the U.S. is its extremely high level of lethal violence," Miller said. "That's because guns turn assaults into deadly assaults, arguments into deadly arguments." Hemenway says the center's agenda is not to advocate against gun ownership, but "there are a lot of reasonable policies to reduce the problem." He believes that the best way to shape policy is to be armed with data. The center has been highly successful in establishing a national reporting and data collection system for firearm injuries and deaths (see Focus Aug 11, 2000), which now has funding from the CDC and has been expanded to include all violent deaths. --Courtney Humphries |
