Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [8]
A relatively new phenomenon, originating in the mid-1980s, is the inclusion of young children on the list of urban gunshot homicides. In 1987 a team of researchers from the UCLA Medical Center and King/Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles found that until 1980, King/Drew hadn’t admitted a single child for gunshot wounds. From 1980 to 1987 the center admitted thirty-four. The study, published in the American Journal of Diseases of Children, included a macabre one-page table that listed the children’s injuries, the relationship of the shooter to the victim, and other data that sketched the true horror of gunshot wounds, a horror ordinarily spared us by reporters pressed for time and news space who concentrate on the dead and dismiss any other victims as simply being wounded. The children, ranging in age from one to nine, were shot in the head, neck, chest, leg, and rectum. A five-year-old lost a hand. A three-year-old, shot in the rectum, endured a colostomy. Other children on the list lost fingers, eyes, and brain tissue, with at least one—an eight-year-old girl—consigned to an institution most likely for the rest of her life. They were shot by grandfathers, robbers, cousins, snipers, friends, and in a particularly cruel twist, by gang members seeking to exact revenge on an elder sibling by killing a younger brother or sister.
No one knows how many people in all incur nonfatal gunshot wounds each year. The most common estimate is that there are five nonfatal wounds for every fatality, or more than 150,000 injuries a year. No one knows for sure, however, because no federal entity keeps track. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, responsible for monitoring injuries from virtually every other consumer product, does not tally gunshot injuries because its founding legislation explicitly excluded firearms from its jurisdiction. One might assume this circumstance came to exist after a pitched battle between the Commission’s backers and the National Rifle Association. The story is less dramatic, but far more disappointing. The sponsors excluded guns because they feared such a battle, and the damage it might do to the rest of the proposed legislation. There was ample reason for this fear, however. The firearms industry and gun lobby have a vested interest in suppressing detailed information on gunshot injuries and accidents, especially when such numbers are linked to specific models of firearms. Accurate statistics would be invaluable to bereaved families seeking to win negligence suits against gun dealers, distributors, and manufacturers. A true tally of nonfatal injuries, moreover, would by itself change the contours of the national debate over guns by providing a more realistic picture of the widespread prevalence of gunshot injury. That Congress should carve an exception for firearms is all the more remarkable given that guns comprise the one class of mass-market product designed from the start to kill.
The nation began arming itself in earnest in the roaring sixties amid student protests, Cold War terror, race riots, and assassinations. Over the most tumultuous years, from 1967 to 1968, the number of handguns annually made available for sale to civilians in the U.S. rose by 50 percent—by some 802,000 pistols and revolvers—to 2.4 million, the greatest single annual leap in American history. In 1960, there were 16 million handguns in America; ten years later, the total had risen to more than 27 million. As of 1989, according to a study by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), there were 66.7 million handguns and 200 million firearms of all kinds in circulation in the United States.
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