The cost of gun violence in the U.S.

The Mother Jones issue of May/June 2015 has an informative article about the cost of gun violence in the U.S.   We often see statistics about how many lives are lost to gun violence (>11,000 in murders, >20,000 in suicides).   But there is virtually no data on cost analysis.

This article estimates that we spend almost as much on gun violence as we do on Medicaid,  something in the range of $229 billion dollars a year.

Of course this is a pretty rough estimate, since the NRA and other gun advocates have pressured politicians to suppress any data collection about gun violence, effectively banning the CDC from funding research.    Mother Jones found that:

"A recent systematic review of studies evaluating access to guns and its association with suicide and homicide identified no relevant studies published since 2005.

"An executive order in 2013 from President Obama sought to free up the CDC via a new budget, but the purse strings remain in the grip of Congress, many of whose members have seen their campaigns backed by six- and even seven-figure sums from the NRA. 'Compounding the lack of research funding,' the doctors [in the survey] added, 'is the fear among some researchers that studying guns will make them political targets and threaten their future funding even for unrelated topics.'

"Miller's [research] approach looks at two categories of costs. The first is direct: Every time a bullet hits somebody, expenses can include emergency services, police investigations, and long-term medical and mental-health care, as well as court and prison costs. About 87 percent of these costs fall on taxpayers. The second category consists of indirect costs: Factors here include lost income, losses to employers, and impact on quality of life, which Miller bases on amounts that juries award for pain and suffering to victims of wrongful injury and death. . . . 

"At $229 billion, the toll from gun violence would have been $47 billion more than Apple's 2014 worldwide revenue and $88 billion more than what the US government budgeted for education that year. Divvied up among every man, woman, and child in the United States, it would work out to more than $700 per person."

Will knowing this make any difference?   Probably not.   Until we get money out of politics, money is going to be the dominant factor on all but a few issues.   Why gun violence is not one of them, I have no answer.   It should be.   But if Columbine and Sandy Hook didn't wake up our NRA-bought politicians, I don't know what it will take.

Ralph