Scarcely a year ago, a 5-month-old girl was transported in nearly full arrest to our emergency department by University City paramedics. She had been shot through the aorta by her father's pistol when it fell out of his coat and discharged as he set her down in her car seat. Open cardiac massage and hours of emergency surgery were not enough to save her.
Last summer, a 4-year-old boy was brought in by St. Louis City paramedics after he found a handgun in a closet at home, placed the barrel into his mouth and pulled the trigger as he had often done to get a drink from a similarly designed water-pistol. He was dead on arrival.
A month before that, a 10-year-old girl in St. Peters destroyed part of her face with an off-duty policeman's revolver discovered in the home they were visiting.
In 1993, 26 children age 12 years and younger were treated at St. Louis Children's Hospital for gunshot injuries. In 1994, that number was 27. Through September of this year, 22 children have been treated. Treatment costs for these children ranged from a low of $1,821 to a high of $386,280. This does not include life-long disabilities and the rehabilitation care that many of these children require.
Contrary to common belief, this is not primarily an urban, inner-city problem. Missouri's Office of Injury Control and the Bureau of Health Resources Statistics reveal that in 1993, 191 children 12 years of age or younger were treated in Missouri's hospitals for gunshot wounds and 12 died. The vast majority (72%) of these child victims were not from the cities of St. Louis or Kansas City.
During the same time, 712 teens ages 13 through 17 years were treated in Missouri's hospitals for gunshot wounds with 92 deaths. Of this older group, 241 (37%) were not shot in St. Louis or Kansas City.
At St. Louis Children's Hospital we treated 58 children (18 years or younger) for gun shot wounds in 1992, 104 in 1993, 77 in 1994, and 78 through October of 1995. Not only does management of these victims drain our medical resources, but costs to the community and family drive the impact much higher.
Clearly our children do not understand the destructive power of firearms. If national trends hold here, half of Missouri homes have firearms and one in five has a handgun with one third of these kept loaded and accessible. Many physicians believe that increasing accessibility to guns poses such a clear hazard to our children's health that the problem is best addressed as a public health menace. Whether this strategy will help stem this tide of violence remains to be shown.
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