How California Ranks For Gun-Related Hospitalizations

ACROSS CALIFORNIA — California ranks among states with a high number of residents hospitalized with firearm injuries over a 16-year period, according to a recently released report.

Approximately 12 in every 100,000 California residents were hospitalized with firearm injuries between 2000 and 2016, a new database developed by The Rand Corp. shows. Nationwide, nearly 548,000 people were hospitalized with similar injuries during that period.

The report, released last week by the nonprofit nonpartisan think tank, hopes to fill a gap in state-level firearm injury data.

Currently, there is no single resource in the country that offers this kind of data, according to researchers.

“This lack of information limits our ability to answer basic questions about gun violence, such as whether trends in gun injuries are changing over time, or whether existing strategies to reduce firearm-related harms are effective,” researchers said in a news release.

The report was released less than five months into 2021, a year in which Americans have seen a staggering number of mass shootings.

On March 16, a single gunman targeted three Atlanta-area massage businesses, killing eight people. Only a week later, a gunman opened fire in a King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, killing 10 people before police apprehended the suspect. Last month, yet another gunman opened fire in an Indianapolis FedEx facility, killing eight people before killing himself.

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Orange County reported a recent mass shooting in April in the city of Orange, where one man shot and killed four people inside an office complex. Only one person survived that incident, a mother whose child died in her arms.

In all, there have been 187 mass shootings in the United States in 2021, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

The definition of a mass shooting is when at least four people are shot, excluding the shooter, according to the archive, which tracks mass shootings in the United States.

To develop its report, Rand pulled data from several sources, including summaries of hospital inpatient data collected through state health departments. The estimates in the report do not include emergency department visits that do not result in hospitalization or gunshot injuries for which hospital-based medical care is not sought.

In 2016, the national average of hospitalizations due to firearm injury was 10 per every 100,000 residents.

California was above average, recording 12 hospitalizations per every 100,000 residents at that time.

The following states had the highest average number of hospitalizations due to firearm injury, according to the report:

• Louisiana: 24 per 100,000 residents
• Tennessee: 18 per 100,000 residents
• Alabama, Missouri and Maryland: 16 per 100,000 residents

These states had the lowest number:

• Hawaii: 2 per 100,000 residents
• Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine: 3 per 100,000 residents
• Iowa and North Dakota: 4 per 100,000 residents

See the full Firearm Injury Hospitalizations in America report.