Noah McCrory
Firearm injury rates last year remained above levels seen before the Covid-19 pandemic for the fourth consecutive year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday, analyzing ambulance call data in 27 states collected through September 2023.
Last year’s high rates come as many communities have seen rates of gun violence improve following an increase during the early years of the pandemic. Instead, only a few groups recorded rates that have not yet fully recovered from the increase.
“Annual rates among blacks and Hispanics remained elevated through 2023; By 2023, rates in other racial and ethnic groups have returned to pre-pandemic levels,” the study authors wrote in their paper, Published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
preliminary CDC data on gun deaths also show that rates last year remained worse than in 2019 nationwide, despite a slowdown from peak levels in 2020 and 2021.
Thursday’s report analyzed data from emergency medical services systems collected by data firm Biospatial, which sought to shed more light on gunshot injuries that do not result in deaths or hospitalizations.
Linking the data to county-level demographics, it found that firearm injury rates “were consistently higher” in counties with serious housing problemswhich also recorded the largest increases compared to 2019.
By income, rates were also higher in counties with greater income inequality and greater Unemployment Rates.
Rates remained higher in men compared to women, similar to before the COVID-19 pandemic, but increases from 2019 “were greater among women.” Similar to the overall rate, both men and women reported higher rates of firearm-related injuries in 2023 than in 2019.
“The uneven distribution of high rates and increases in EMS encounters with firearm injuries highlights the need for states and communities to develop and implement comprehensive firearm injury prevention strategies,” the authors wrote.
Worse in children than before the pandemic
When measured against pre-pandemic rates, the authors found that the subgroup “with the largest persistent rise in 2023” was firearm injury rates in children and adolescents, up to age 14.
About 235 of every 100,000 emergency medical services “encounters” in the data for children 14 and under were for gunshot injuries in 2023, ranging from third-party gunshot wounds to self-inflicted accidental injuries.
This is more than 1.5 times higher than in 2019, where 148.5 in every 100,000 ambulance calls for children were for gunshot injuries.
But when measured against other groups in 2023, the study authors found that the worst rates occurred in teenagers and young adults, ages 15 to 24. Rates in this group were also worse in 2019, before the pandemic.
Of every 100,000 ambulance calls among teens and young adults, 1,045 of them were for gunshot injuries in 2023.
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