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Ten thousand children are either killed or injured in school shootings in the United States each year, according to a new study.
Over 7,000 children, wounded by gunshots, are sent to the hospital amounting to 20 each day, the study published in Paediatrics Monday has found.
“That’s more than 7,000 children injured badly enough to be hospitalised,” said Dr John Leventhal, the study’s lead author and a professor of paediatrics at the Yale School of Medicine. “All are unnecessary hospitalisations because preventing gun violence is something that can actually be done.”
Six percent of those who are hospitalised die from serious injuries, the study said. Three thousand die before they can even be taken to the emergency room, Leventhal noted.
In addition, earlier studies, which looked at child mortality related to firearms, confirmed that 3,000 deaths happen a year, according to experts. “This study reinforces what we know from the mortality data,” said Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Centre for Gun Policy and Research. “We have an extraordinary health burden in our youth associated with firearms injuries.”
Reviewing the 2009 Kids’ Inpatient Database (KID), which tracks paediatric hospital stays, the Yale researchers found that 7,391 children under the age of 20 had been admitted to the hospital due to injuries caused by for firearm, of whom 453 died.
The KID’s data was gathered between 1997 and 2009 as part of the Healthcare Cost and Utilisation Project on behalf of the Department of Health and Human Services.
According to an investigation by the Daily Beast, one school shooting has taken place in America every two weeks on average.
Many critics blame the country’s notoriously liberal gun control laws for the high rate of gun violence. – Presstv.
Online Reporter