The economic cost of gun violence in America was $810 billion in one year. Here’s why

The recent shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, that saw 19 children and two teachers killed, once again showed the brutality of gun violence in the US.

But behind each of these deadly shootings is a catalogue of numbers that’s just as shocking.

Every day, more than 110 Americans are killed by guns and more than 200 are left injured.

That’s about 20,000 deaths and 36,000 injuries so far this year.

Mr Miller has another figure to add to this list. For decades, he has periodically crunched the numbers and worked out the price tag of gun violence in the US.

By his latest calculations, using 2019 data, it comes to $US557 billion (or $810 billion) in one year.

Calculating the costs

Mr Miller broke down the economic costs of gun violence into two categories: Direct and indirect.

After every shooting, there is a string of direct costs that may affect an individual, their family and their immediate circle.

“There’s medical care, not only of the injury when it first happens, but the lifetime of medical care that can follow, for example, a traumatic brain injury or spinal cord injury. And there’s mental health care for the victim and the victim’s family,” Mr Miller says.

He says direct costs also included the need for emergency services like police and then the involvement of the criminal justice system, from court costs to incarceration costs.

Mr Miller then looked at the indirect costs or “the [lost] value of life,” which he broke down into “the work loss, both wage work and household work … [because] if you’re killed, you lose a lifetime of work costs” and “lost quality of life.”

The “lost quality of life,” which formed the bulk of the overall amount, represented “the present value of what was irreparably damaged when a victim’s life was cut short or a survivor was permanently disabled by gun violence.”

Using 2019 data from US federal government sources and a cost model developed by the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, these direct and indirect costs added up to $US557 billion, or $810 billion, in one year.

This was a big spike from Mr Miller’s last analysis of gun violence.

Far higher than previously thought

The costs calculated from the 2019 data ($US557 billion) were substantially higher than the last time Mr Miller crunched the numbers using the 2018 data. Those figures worked out to be $US280 billion ($406 billion).

Mr Miller says this was because of one significant numerical change.

US federal government departments and agencies recently settled on a “value of a life” amount that was substantially higher than what was previously used. So Mr Miller adopted the same metric.

“We’ve gone from using a value of a human life of about $US6-6.5 million ($8.5-9 million) to one that’s about $US10.5 million ($15 million),” he says.

As a result, the economic cost of gun violence is much higher than previously thought.

Who foots the bill?

When it comes to the direct costs, specifically around healthcare, the government (so, the taxpayer) foots a big portion of the bill.

“Most of the firearm injuries are covered by Medicare or Medicaid, which are our public insurance programs for lower income people,” Mr Miller says.

“Private health insurance pays another large chunk … And some [bills] will even be paid out-of-pocket by people who were shot.”

Mr Miller says the government has “some income transfer programs for people who are severely and permanently disabled” by gun violence meaning it “picks up some of those indirect wage losses as well.”

US employers are also paying the costs for gun violence.

“Employers pay for things like life insurance and [after an episode of gun violence] they have to go hire and train a new employee,” Mr Miller says.

Suicide and guns

While US gun violence is often associated with mass shootings, suicide accounts for around 60 per cent of all lives lost to guns.

The analysis showed that suicides have lower overall economic costs associated with them, as less is spent on direct costs like the criminal justice system and incarceration.

But as Mr Miller and his team put it: “The intangible cost in pain and suffering is a crushing weight to bear.”

And the prevalence of guns plays a big part in where the suicides and homicides occur.

“One of the interesting things that we’ve learned through research is that your chance of dying by suicide, and your chance of dying by homicide, are both much higher if you have a gun in your home,” Mr Miller says.

Action on guns

Despite the regularity of gun violence in the US, there was some good news for gun control activists last month.

US Congress passed the most sweeping gun violence bill in decades, a bipartisan compromise on an issue which bitterly divides Americans.

The new law included a package of measures, such as toughening background checks for younger gun buyers, restrictions on gun ownership for perpetrators of domestic violence and funding for mental health programs.

“Lives will be saved,” President Joe Biden said at the White House while signing the law.

But the law was signed only days after the US Supreme Court expanded gun rights by ruling that Americans have a right to carry firearms in public for personal defence.