Impact of state gun laws on pediatric deaths
June 18, 2025
Summary: States with stricter gun laws since 2010 had far fewer children die of firearm-related causes. A separate study points to high employer plan costs from gun injuries.
Source: Faust, et al JAMA Pediatrics June 9, 2025. Fourteen states were rated as strict, 14 as permissive, and 22 as very permissive.
Firearms are the leading cause of death for children and adolescents in the US, which has the highest rate of gun-related mortality among developed countries. The Supreme Court allowed states to prohibit localities from enforcing stricter gun laws in 2010, creating a “natural experiment” where researchers could review data on pediatric deaths in states which made their gun laws more permissive or restrictive after this decision.
Their research, published in JAMA Pediatrics, shows that there were 7058 excess firearm deaths in the U.S. from 2011-2023, and these were concentrated in states that had the most permissive gun laws. Non-Hispanic Blacks had the highest rates of excess deaths, and the largest increases in pediatric deaths in both ‘permissive’ and ‘most permissive’ states after 2010.
An editorial published in JAMA in 2022 pointed out that each nonfatal firearm injury led to $30,000 in direct health care cost per survivor in an employer-sponsored health plan, and estimated that employers suffered losses of $535 million of revenue and productivity due to gun violence.
Implications for employers:
The epidemic of gun violence in the United States continues to take a terrible toll on children and adolescents.
Employers continue to bear substantial costs from gun violence, including medical claims, disability, lost productivity and mental health issues.
Let try real data and no Nazi propaganda..
There are about 700,000 physicians in the US. The US Institute of Medicine estimates that each year between 44,000 and 98,000 people die as a result of medical errors (Kohn et al., 1999). This makes for a yearly accidental death rate per doctor of between 0.063 and 0.14. In other words, up to one in seven doctors will kill a patient each year by mistake. In contrast, there are 80 million gun owners in the US. They are responsible for 1500 accidental gun deaths in a typical year (e.g., National Safety Council, 2004). This means that the accidental death rate, caused by gun owner error, is 0.000019 per gun owner per year. Only about one in 53,000 gun owners will kill somebody by mistake. Doctors then, are 7500 times more likely than gun owners to kill somebody as a result of human error.
https://www.faasafety.gov/files/gslac/library/documents/2019/Feb/177210/Rejoinder%20to%20Error%20Counting.pdf
But preventable medical errors causing deaths? Almost 7x as many deaths! Approximately 250,00 confirmed fatalities due to preventable medical errors. And some researchers believe that number could be closer to 440,000.
https://protectingpatientrights.com/doctors-kill-people-year-preventable-deaths-car-accidents-guns/
With medical errors contributing to thousands of deaths in the U.S. annually, statistics suggest doctors kill more than guns. Gun violence caused about 49,000 fatalities in the U.S. in 2021. Preventable medical mistakes account for around six times as many fatalities. Johns Hopkins researchers found that preventable medical mistakes cause up to 250,000 fatalities annually. The top reasons people die in hospitals include surgical errors, diagnostic and treatment errors, faulty medical devices, and hospital-acquired infections.
https://ankinlaw.com/do-doctors-kill-more-than-guns/