- Posted August 27, 2025
Child Gun Wounds More Common In Poor Neighborhoods
Children living in poor neighborhoods are up to 20 times more likely to be hospitalized for a gunshot wound, a new study says.
These hospitalizations most often are the result of unintentional shootings, caused by mishandling or accidental discharge of a firearm, researchers added.
“Our study shows that where you and your family live is directly tied to your child’s odds of being injured or killed by a firearm,” senior researcher Dr. Anne Stey said in a news release. She’s an assistant professor of surgery at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.
Firearm injuries are currently the leading cause of death among U.S. children, researchers said in background notes.
For the study, researchers analyzed hospital data for nearly 7,000 gun injuries among children 17 and younger that occurred between 2016 and 2021 in Florida, Maryland, New York and Wisconsin.
They compared those records with data from the Child Opportunity Index, which ranks neighborhoods from very low- to very high-opportunity based on education, health care access and other socioeconomic factors.
More than 1 in 4 ZIP codes (28%) in very low-opportunity neighborhoods were hot spots for child gun injuries, compared with just 5% of ZIP codes in very high-opportunity areas, results show.
Children in low-opportunity neighborhoods in Maryland were more than 20 times as likely to be hospitalized for a gun injury, researchers found. That disparity was nearly 19 times in Wisconsin, 16 in New York and eight in Florida.
“The fewer opportunities a child has in their neighborhood, the greater their odds of ending up in the hospital with a firearm injury,” researcher Dr. Mehul Raval, head of pediatric surgery at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago, said in a news release.
Unintentional shootings accounted for 57% to 63% of all hospitalizations, researchers said. Assaults represented 32% to 39% of gunshot injuries, and self-inflicted wounds 1% to 7%.
These results show that hospitals in specific areas should consider reorganizing in anticipation of more gun injuries, researchers said.
In addition, these “hot spots” could benefit from programs that emphasize firearms safety, researchers added.
“Child Access Prevention laws, which require safe storage of guns, have already been shown to reduce accidental and suicide-related deaths among children,” Stey said. “Our next step is to measure how these interventions can further lower unintentional firearm injuries.”
The new study appears in the journal Pediatrics.
More information
The University of Rochester Medical Center has more on firearms safety.
SOURCE: Northwestern University, news release, Aug. 25, 2025
