Accidental gun killings surged after Sandy Hook school shooting
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Quote:A surge in gun buying in the months immediately following the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, corresponded with an increase in accidental gun deaths in the United States, one-third of them in children, according to an analysis published today in Science.
About 60 additional unintended shooting deaths, roughly 20 of them in children, occurred in the 5 months after the shooting, conclude the study’s authors, economists Phillip Levine and Robin McKnight of Wellesley College in Massachusetts. For all of the 2012 calendar year, there were 545 accidental shooting deaths, or about 45 per month, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. So a 60-death bump in a 5-month period is a considerable one.
Gun sales in the United States can increase after mass shootings. The authors of the new paper estimate that an additional 3 million guns were sold nationwide from December 2012 through April 2013, the 5-month window immediately before and for several months after a lone gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook on 14 December. But this is the first time researchers have found a coincident surge in accidental gun deaths: Levine and McKnight studied trends in firearms sales and accidental gun deaths from 2008 through 2015 and found no other instances of such a pattern.
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