As the health and medicine reporter for the Tampa Bay Times, I had a hunch that pediatric gun injuries were on the rise. But the Florida Department of Health didn’t have an official count. Neither did the state Department of Law Enforcement. Data reporter Connie Humburg and I set out to check the theory on our own. To do so, we requested more than 60 million hospital discharge records from the state Agency for Health Care Administration, as well as data from each of Florida’s regional medical examiner’s offices. After crunching the numbers, we discovered that a kid is shot in Florida every 17 hours. Child gun deaths had increased nearly 20 percent between 2010 and 2015. Child gun injuries, meanwhile, had increased about 36 percent.
Our analysis didn’t stop there. Black boys, we found, were two times more likely to get shot than white boys in 2015. We also used the data to understand how guns were hurting kids. Accidents were just as common as assaults. But accidents were growing at a far faster pace. Guns, we learned, were killing more children than cardiovascular, infectious or respiratory diseases.
And while the health department has a statewide campaign to reduce drownings, there was nothing aimed at reducing the number of child gun incidents, which kill roughly as many children 17 and under. The first story in the series focused on the analysis, and explored possible reasons for the trends. The second told the story of a young girl who shot accidentally herself in 2010, and explained why gunshot wounds can be particularly devastating to children. The third probed solutions being considered by state lawmakers. We circled back in May to tell readers Florida lawmakers had taken no action on the issue, and show that the problem was ongoing.