Sofia Chaudhary

sofia.s.chaudhary@emory.edu

A 12-year-old boy with a gunshot wound (GSW) to the chest is wheeled into the trauma bay, unresponsive, pulseless and undergoing CPR and subsequently dies. The patient’s 6-year old brother found their father’s gun while playing and pointed it at him. The parents now face the shattering loss of their older son and also the psychological impacts for their younger son, the second victim. Tragedies such as this have become too familiar for emergency departments across the US as the number of pediatric firearm deaths continue to climb annually

Firearms are the second leading cause of pediatric death in the US taking the lives of over 1,700 and injuring more than 6,500 children and teens (ages 0-17) in 2019.¹ Homicide accounted for a majority of these deaths, but 40% were from firearm-assisted suicide and 5% from unintentional injuries. Middle schoolers and high schoolers in the US are now more likely to die from a gun than from any other cause, including motor vehicle collisions.² Additionally, 4.6 million children in the US live in a home with at least one unlocked and loaded gun, double the rates of firearm exposure from a decade earlier.³ Access to an improperly stored firearm in the home increases the risk of both pediatric unintentional firearm injury and firearm assisted-suicide (by 2-5x).^4-7