A tweet from Monday popped up first thing this morning in between stories about Trumpublican Rep. Matt Gaetz. This report on the ultimate costs of gun violence from Mother Jones is more important even if it is less timely.
The report predates the mass slayings in Las Vegas (October 2017), El Paso and Dayton (August 2019), and in Atlanta and Boulder this month. It predates the NRA’s filing bankruptcy this year. It predates Sen. Lindsey Graham telling Fox News he keeps an AR-15 to protect his home against imagined marauders prowling his neighborhood after a natural disaster.
Getting at the true cost of gun violence is hampered by the gun lobby’s efforts to prevent the government from collecting them. Plus, researchers fear collecting and studying them will make them political targets:
David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, describes the chill this way: “There are so many big issues in the world, and the question is: Do you want to do gun research? Because you’re going to get attacked. No one is attacking us when we do heart disease.”
Reporters Mark Follman, Julia Lurie, Jaeah Lee, and James West in 2015 compiled the costs to the country of the ongoing plague of gun violence with the help of Ted Miller at the independent nonprofit Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation:
Miller’s 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.
In collaboration with Miller, Mother Jones crunched data from 2012 and found that the annual cost of gun violence in America exceeds $229 billion. Direct costs account for $8.6 billion—including long-term prison costs for people who commit assault and homicide using guns, which at $5.2 billion a year is the largest direct expense. Even before accounting for the more intangible costs of the violence, in other words, the average cost to taxpayers for a single gun homicide in America is nearly $400,000. And we pay for 32 of them every single day.
This is the sobering truth from which America has yet to sober up (using data available in 2015):
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.
And those figures are incomplete. Lifelong medical and disability expenses, including the costs of pain medication and mental health treatments, are difficult to quantify. Thanks to industry efforts to suppress such research, the data are just not there.
Most gun deaths are the work of amateurs. To kill a man … slowly … on a public street … with only your knee … as he cries out for his mama? That takes a professional.