Thousands of children and teens in the U.S. are sent to the emergency room every year for gun-related injuries, according to a new study.
The study, which researchers are calling the first of its kind, looked at estimates of emergency room visits in a national database from the Agency on Healthcare Research and Quality, a U.S. government agency.
It showed that from 2006 to 2014, some 75,000 kids 18 and younger suffered some sort of gun-related injury. That averages out to 8,300 a year. More than a third of the kids were hospitalized, and 6 percent died. And all of this cost almost $3 billion.
The research also found the average age of victims was around 15 and nearly half of the injuries were from assault weapons. Forty percent of injuries were unintentional and 2 percent were suicides.
Researchers did point out that the study didn't include kids injured or killed that didn't make it to a hospital, so the number of gun-related injuries could be even higher.
