American emergency rooms treat at least one firearm injury every 30 minutes

The COVID-19 pandemic and its corresponding increase in shootings sparked a national conversation around firearm injury, emergency room visits, and the treatment of gun violence victims in hospitals. Five years later, the conversation has faded, but new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that gun violence remains a stubborn presence across the country, with 93,022 shooting injuries treated in hospitals from 2018 to 2023. 

According to the research, an American emergency room treats at least one firearm injury every 30 minutes, reported The Trace.

“Most cities use police data to inform prevention planning, but data from hospital and public health sources is an essential, and often missing, piece to guide action, as many incidents of violence and crime are not reported to police,” said Dr. Adam Rowh, a medical epidemiologist at the CDC and lead author of the study, via e-mail to The Trace.

The study, published in Annals of Internal Medicine last month, analyzed the CDC’s data on emergency department firearm injuries, which is limited to the District of Columbia and nine states: Florida, Georgia, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Utah, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia. The study showed that the monthly rates for shooting injuries were highest in July and lowest in February; daily rates were disproportionately high on holidays, and nighttime peaks were the highest on Friday and Saturday, consistent with prior research. The researchers also found that rates were highest between 2:30 and 3:00 a.m., and were the lowest between 10:00 and 10:30 a.m. 

The authors of the study concluded that knowing the periods when gunshot injuries are highest could be essential both in deploying care and in effectively allocating resources, such as trauma preparedness, ambulance services, hospital staffing, and strategies for intervention. 

One of those strategies is hospital-based violence intervention programs (HVIPs), an effort aimed at mitigating reinjury by providing holistic and rehabilitative care to shooting victims. The model, first developed 30 years ago, has spread nationwide, and various programs fund their services through myriad resources, most notably through grants now facing the threat of cuts and closures. 

“It’s happening on every front,” January Serda, the grant coordinator of one such program in Newport News, Virginia, said of federal cuts to community violence intervention funding, education, and healthcare.

Dr. Randi Smith, a trauma surgeon who launched an HVIP at Grady Memorial Hospital, in Atlanta, Georgia, said she has attended to a gunshot victim on every one of her on-call days in the trauma center. Financial and social investment in such programs is as paramount to treatment as life-saving medical care, she emphasized. 

“I was very motivated to start a violence intervention program, taking best practices from some of the programs that I have been a part of and shortcomings that I had learned from the past,” Smith said. The program she started in 2023, Interrupting Violence Among Youth and Young Adults, is one of the few based in the Southeast. 

The program has served more than a thousand people, including survivors and their family members. According to Smith, its reinjury rates are less than 3 percent, compared with national benchmarks that are up to 30 percent and institutional benchmarks that are between 12 and 15 percent. 

Her work has a long legacy. Nearly four decades ago, physicians and nurses —  especially those with public health experience — were among the first cohort of medical practitioners to recognize gun violence as a public health issue. That recognition was largely based on what they witnessed in hospitals and emergency rooms, as the rate of shootings reached historic highs in the 1980s and ‘90s. Those firsthand accounts were pivotal in the development of the nation’s first hospital-based violence intervention programs.

Serda, the grant coordinator for an HVIP in Virginia, said in today’s multilayered crisis, it’s more paramount than ever to prioritize care for the people on the frontlines. She came to violence intervention from nonprofit management and fundraising for survivors of sexual assault in 2022, after her 17-year-old son, Justice Dunham, was fatally shot in a high school parking lot after a basketball game.

“I was blown away by the lack of training around trauma-informed care, or safe spaces and outlets, for nurses and practitioners, and people who are seeing this firsthand and helping the community,” said Serda, who began to advocate for trauma-informed initiatives designed to help patients, her HVIP team and others address the emotional impact of caring for victims of violence and firearm injuries. “There was no discussion about compassion fatigue, or burnout, or vicarious trauma.”

As hospital personnel adjust to the ever-evolving firearm violence crisis, Smith said listening to their experiences, and supporting their well-being, has never been more crucial. 

“I think a lot of people are looking at the recent news, post-pandemic, that shootings have decreased, and have not realized that we as hospital staff are still treating patients day after day,” said Smith, “dealing with a medical environment that shifted significantly since the pandemic, and navigating extreme burnout.”

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CREATORS: Gun Violence is a Health Epidemic in This Country

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
May 5, 2025

Last summer, the U.S. surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, declared gun violence a public health crisis.

The advisory issued by the nation's top doctor was the first step to drive down gun deaths. Data from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) found that gun violence claimed 46,728 lives in 2023, down slightly from 2022, but still the third-highest annual gun-related deaths ever recorded in the United States.

Though they tend to get less public attention than gun-related murders, suicides have long accounted for the majority of U.S. gun deaths. In 2023, according to the Pew Research Center, 58% of all gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides.

With that in mind, only weeks into his new term, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to protect the Second Amendment: "The Second Amendment is an indispensable safeguard of security and liberty. It has preserved the right of the American people to protect ourselves, our families, and our freedoms since the founding of our great Nation. Because it is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans, the right to keep and bear arms must not be infringed."

In March, consistent with the President's order, the administration removed the advisory on gun violence as a public health issue from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' website.

According to The Guardian, the CDC website "Firearm Violence in America," where the advisory had been posted, was filled with data and information about the ripple effects of shootings, the prevalence of firearm suicides and the number of American children and adolescents who have been shot and killed.

The removal of the website and the Surgeon General's warning is unconscionable. Gun violence is a health epidemic for young people in this country.

A report released in September of 2024, by the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, based on data from the CDC, found for the third straight year, firearms killed more children and teens, ages 1 to 17, than any other causes of death, including car crashes and cancer.

The CDC is part of the federal Department of Health and Human Services. HHS is slashing personnel from the CDC. In a recently issued fact sheet, HHS said the CDC's workforce was being reduced by 2,400 people, and the goal is to streamline divisions within the agency and get rid of redundancies.

Last month, the CDC's Injury Center and its Division of Violence Prevention — a unit that studies and works to prevent gun deaths and injuries — lost personnel.

According to National Public Radio, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said, "(T)he reality is clear: what we've been doing isn't working. Despite spending $1.9 trillion in annual costs, Americans are getting sicker every year."

More than half a century ago, when Kennedy's father was the U.S. Attorney General, Luther L. Terry, M.D., Surgeon General of the U.S. Public Health Service, released the first report of the Surgeon General's Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health. Terry convened a committee of specialists who reviewed some 7,000 scientific articles and worked with more than 150 consultants to formulate the report, finding that cigarette smoking caused lung cancer.

The report spawned numerous other efforts at various levels of government to curb smoking, including the now-familiar surgeon general's warning on the side of cigarette packages, increased taxation, restrictions on advertising and limiting public areas where people can smoke, along with programs and products to help people kick the habit.

Fortunately, when former President Richard Nixon was elected in 1968, he didn't undo the work of Terry, nor has any president since. Why was that fortunate for America?

As a result of Terry's groundbreaking health advisory, it is estimated that, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association, between 1964 and 2014, 8 million lives were saved due to pervasive tobacco-control measures.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.

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Drug overdose deaths down 17% according to CDC

Drug overdose deaths in the United States fell 17% between July 2023 and July 2024, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a recent report, according to CBS News. 

Since 2021, over 100,000 people have died of overdoses each year in the United States. A record number of overdose deaths — over 108,000 — were recorded in 2022. The numbers dipped in 2023 and have continued to drop monthly throughout 2024. 

While overdose deaths for 2024 have not been calculated yet, and will not be until after the end of the year, the CDC said that deaths fell 17% in a one-year period. It's the largest decrease in deaths ever seen in the United States, White House Domestic Policy Council Advisor Neera Tanden said Wednesday. 

White House Office of National Drug Control Policy Director Dr. Rahul Gupta said the decrease shows that the Biden administration's efforts to reduce overdose deaths are working. 

The vast majority of overdose deaths in the United States involve opioids, including fentanyl. There has been a decrease in such deaths, CBS News previously reported, but a rise in deaths involving psychostimulants like meth and cocaine.

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Gun deaths reached the highest number ever recorded in the U.S. in 2020

Gun deaths reached the highest number ever recorded in the United States in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, as gun-related homicides surged by 35 percent, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported, according to The New York Times.

“This is a historic increase, with the rate having reached the highest level in over 25 years,” Dr. Debra E. Houry, acting principal deputy director of the C.D.C. and the director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, said at a news briefing.

More than 45,000 Americans died in gun-related incidents as the pandemic spread in the United States, the highest number on record, federal data show. The gun homicide rate was the highest reported since 1994.

That represents the largest one-year increase in gun homicides in modern history, according to Ari Davis, a policy adviser at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, which recently released its own analysis of C.D.C. data.

Cities from coast to coast have seen bloody episodes of gun violence since the pandemic began, but the new report is official confirmation of something that many Americans had already sensed: Amid the stress and upheaval, citizens turned to guns in numbers rarely seen.

The new numbers reveal not only startling increases in the rates of gun homicide, but also document “widened disparities” that existed even before the pandemic began, the C.D.C. said.

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Homicides involving firearms were generally highest, and showed the largest increases, in poor communities, and exacted a disproportionate toll on younger Black men in particular. Deaths of Black women, though smaller in number, also increased significantly.

More than half of gun deaths were suicides, however, and that number did not substantially increase from 2019 to 2020. The overall rise in gun deaths therefore was 15 percent in 2020, the C.D.C. said.

The rise in gun violence has afflicted cities large and small, in both blue and red states, leaving law enforcement scrambling for answers. In many places, like Los Angeles and Denver, the increases have persisted in 2021, and trends this year so far show no sign of a reversal.

 “We have two things together: the trauma of the past two years, and the mental health crisis that came out of this pandemic,” Mayor Eric M. Garcetti of Los Angeles said earlier this year at an event to discuss crime. “Those things have caused us to see more violence.”

Christopher Herrmann, an assistant professor in the department of law and police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said he was not surprised by the C.D.C.’s analysis but was worried by what it might augur in the coming summer, when there are typically more gun homicides.

“June, July, August are always the biggest shooting months,” he said, adding that most large American cities see about a 30 percent uptick in shootings and homicides in the summer.

Federal officials and outside experts were not certain what caused the surge in gun deaths.

“One possible explanation is stressors associated with the Covid pandemic that could have played a role, including changes and disruption to services and education, social isolation, housing instability and difficulty covering daily expenses,” said Thomas R. Simon, associate director for science at the C.D.C.’s division of violence prevention.

The rise also corresponded to accelerated sales of firearms as the pandemic spread and lockdowns became the norm, the C.D.C. analysis noted. Americans went on a gun-buying spree in 2020 that continued into 2021, when in a single week the F.B.I. reported a record 1.2 million background checks.

The primary reason people give for purchasing a handgun is self-protection. But research published in the 1990s established that simply having a gun in the home increases the risk of a gun homicide by a factor of three, and increases the risk of a suicide by a factor of five.

Today, gun buying has largely returned to prepandemic levels, but there remain roughly 15 million more guns in circulation than there would be without the pandemic, according to Garen J. Wintemute, a gun violence researcher at the University of California, Davis.

But gun homicide has many roots. Federal researchers also cited disruptions in routine health care; protests over police use of lethal force; a rise in domestic violence; inequitable access to health care; and longstanding systemic racism that has contributed to poor housing conditions, limited educational opportunities and high poverty rates.

Law enforcement officials and criminologists pointed not just to the pandemic, but also to the divisive presidential election in 2020, as gun buying tends to increase at times of deep political polarization.

And there is a sense, harder to quantify, that psyches are frayed — that citizens may be quicker to turn to violence when provoked.

“Something has happened to the American people during this two years that has taken violence to a new level,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit that studies law enforcement policy.

“We don’t know what it is, but if you talk to police chiefs they will tell you that what used to be some small altercation now becomes a shooting and a homicide.”

Black Americans remained disproportionately affected by gun violence in 2020. Firearm homicide rates increased by 39.5 percent among Black people from 2019 to 2020, to 11,904. The victims were overwhelmingly young men.

The Johns Hopkins analysis found that Black men ages 15 to 34 accounted for 38 percent of all gun homicide victims in 2020, though this group represented just 2 percent of the U.S. population.

Black men ages 15 to 34 were more than 20 times more likely to be killed with a gun than white men of the same age. The number of Black women killed by guns also increased by almost 50 percent in 2020 compared with 2019, Mr. Davis said.

Rising rates of gun-related homicides were seen in all racial and ethnic groups, except among Americans of Asian and Pacific Islander descent, who saw a small decrease.

Gun-related suicides have long been more common among older white men. But in 2020, rates rose mostly sharply among Native Americans and Alaska Native groups, although the numbers were still small compared with those among white men.

“We’re going to need to develop different types of solutions to deal with different types of gun violence,” Mr. Davis said.

The last time homicide rates involving firearms peaked was during the crack epidemic of 1993-94, said Andrew Morral, a senior behavioral scientist at RAND Corporation and the director of the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research. Rates declined until 2015, but have been inching up ever since.

“It’s pretty alarming,” Mr. Morral said. “It’s a bigger jump than I would have expected.”

But there is no solid explanation for the decline or the rise, he added: “In a sense it’s a mystery. It’s the big question everyone wants the answer to. Everyone has a theory, but it’s very hard to test the theories.”

Even if the pandemic is part of the answer, “that doesn’t explain why rates have been rising since 2016,” he said.

The C.D.C. is currently funding 18 research projects aimed at identifying causes of gun violence and developing solutions. The research spans a broad range of interventions: One experiment relies on outreach workers to mediate potentially lethal conflicts in a community, while another provides services to teens and young adults who have been hospitalized with gun injuries.

Others involve distribution of free lockboxes for storing firearms safely in the home.

Projects like these were frozen under the 1996 Dickey Amendment, named after Representative Jay Dickey, Republican of Arkansas, which barred the C.D.C. from spending money to advocate or promote gun control.

Congress has restored $25 million in funding for firearm injury prevention research, which is split between the C.D.C. and the National Institutes of Health.

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Reform advocates push Biden for creation of gun violence office

 Many groups advocating for gun reform and violence prevention have pushed President Biden for the creation of an office in the executive branch focused solely on gun violence, reported The Trace.

Advocates say that Biden’s silence on the matter suggests he isn’t prioritizing the crisis. At the same time, the president promised to keep doing everything in his power to “make sure communities are safer.”

The office and its director would be responsible for coordinating a government-wide response to a worsening crisis. It would employ public health strategies, support and evaluate prevention programs, collect much-needed data, and hold other agencies accountable — with the ultimate goal of reducing shootings.

Creating such an office would be relatively easy. It could be accomplished by executive order, without congressional approval, and the idea is not a new one. Presidents — including Biden — have for decades created offices or other specialized units to tackle complex challenges. It’s become a common way for presidents to enact their will, with some clear advantages — as well as mixed results.

Establishing an office to tackle gun violence would mean that the federal government’s disparate groups and staffers devoted to the issue would be forced to collaborate, instead of tackling facets of it in isolation. So far, the Biden administration has suggested it is taking a different approach. It has directed several departments — sometimes separately and sometimes in collaboration — to take steps to address gun violence through enforcement, regulation, and funding. It has pointed to Susan Rice, the head of the Domestic Policy Council, as the administration’s point person on gun policy, though her portfolio goes far beyond the issue.

“The President is not standing still while too many innocent lives are being lost each day due to gun violence,” Biden spokesperson Michael Gwin told The Trace in an emailed statement, “so he’s going to continue to push Congress to act on common-sense measures that are currently being blocked by Senate Republicans, and he’ll continue to use the tools at his disposal to take further action, such as what we saw with last week’s announcement.”

Still, advocates are clamoring for an office of gun violence prevention, saying the Biden administration’s efforts are not enough. “There’s nobody overseeing how those different pieces fit into a single puzzle,” said Igor Volsky, the director of Guns Down America, a gun reform advocacy group, who added that he believes Rice’s portfolio is too large to give gun violence the attention it deserves. 

March For Our Lives, a gun reform group largely founded by the survivors of the 2018 Parkland, Florida, school shooting, has been perhaps the most outspoken proponent of appointing a national director of gun violence prevention.

“We’re very clear on the fact that if no one has gun violence as their chief priority, it’s going to fall to the wayside,” said Zeenat Yahya, policy director for March For Our Lives.

Proponents like Yahya and the 36 members of Congress who wrote a letter to Biden in favor of creating the office say doing so would signal that the federal government is taking the crisis seriously and break down silos among a growing list of federal agencies working on the issue.

The extensive list of players includes the Department of Justice — and its law enforcement agencies like the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives — and the Department of Health and Human Services, which houses the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. Others, like the departments of Education, State, Veterans Affairs, Labor, Homeland Security, and Commerce, also fund violence prevention, research gun violence, and regulate firearms.

The advocates for a centralized federal response say it’s not a big ask. With a few exceptions, Congress has not challenged the president’s authority to organize and appoint officials in the executive branch. The office could begin, advocates say, by auditing existing grant programs across the federal government to find out what’s working and what isn’t — and then make it easier for nonprofits, cities, and states to access grant money. It could generate sorely lacking data about gun violence and the effectiveness of prevention programs, and research and create public awareness campaigns. With millions in new grants for community violence intervention programs made available over the last year, a centralized place evaluating the data from those programs is increasingly important.

“The major thing is that there is something created that can sustain a comprehensive strategy, and, year-to-year, continue to build on that strategy,” said Greg Jackson, the executive director of the Community Justice Action Fund, a nonprofit organization that promotes community-based strategies for violence prevention.

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CDC: The rate of gun deaths of children 14 and under rose 50%

According to The New York Times, the Gun Violence Archive found that more than 1,500 children and teenagers younger than 18 were killed in homicides and accidental shootings in 2021, compared with about 1,380 in 2020.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found in a recent report that the rate of gun deaths of children 14 and younger rose by roughly 50 percent from the end of 2019 to the end of 2020.

Researchers say the increase is a fatal consequence of rising nationwide homicide rates, untreated traumas of COVID-19, improper gun storage, and a surge of pandemic gun-buying that is putting more children into close contact with guns as either victims or shooters.

The Crime Report suggest that much of the toll is concentrated in a few dozen big cities, with Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, and Milwaukee at the top of the list. Despite 15 states pledging nearly $700 million toward gun-violence prevention, and larger cities like Philadelphia funneling millions into violence-intervention programs, youth leadership groups and community groups, the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted many of these programs.

And while the recent school shooting in Michigan led to involuntary manslaughter charges being levied against the shooter’s parents, one of the first of such legal actions in the country, legal experts say that adult gun owners are rarely charged when their weapons are involved in shootings that kill children and teenagers.  Although incidents like the high school shooting in Michigan garner national attention, many families say that the majority of shootings, which disproportionately affect Black and Hispanic children and teenagers in poorer neighborhoods, fail to elicit wider concern.

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Black males 20 times more likely to die from gun fire than white males

Young Black men and teens made up more than a third of firearm homicide victims in the USA in 2019, one of several disparities revealed in a review of gun mortality data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to the USA Today.

The analysis, titled "A Public Health Crisis in the Making," found that although Black men and boys ages 15 to 34 make up just 2% of the nation's population, they were among 37% of gun homicides that year.

That's 20 times higher than white males of the same age group.

Of all reported firearm homicides in 2019, more than half of victims were Black men, according to the study spearheaded by the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. Sixty-three percent of male victims were Black.

The contrast is even more stark when the rates were compared with white people: Across all ages, Black men were nearly 14 times more likely to die in a firearm homicide than white men, and eight times more likely to die in a firearm homicide than the general population, including women. 

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TCR: What COVID-19 Can Teach Us About Curbing Gun Violence

Matthew T. Mangino
The Crime Report
July 6, 2021

What can the criminal justice system learn from the COVID-19 pandemic?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has begun to relax health guidelines. In fact, some states have “fully reopened.”

Even as President Joe Biden has acknowledged that his July 4 goal of vaccinating 70 percent of Americans will fall short, many other states are planning for a return to normalcy.

The RAND Corporation created a COVID-19 model to analyze what could happen with coronavirus deaths in the United States if the restrictions—capacity limits on businesses, closed schools, mask mandates—all go away on July 4.

Based on RAND’s model, fully reopening an economy before the target is met would double the average number of COVID-19 deaths between Independence Day and the end of the year.

We know from history that relaxing in the face of a pandemic is deadly.

Pittsburgh’s experience during the 1918 Spanish flu offers some insight.

According to Eric Jaffe’s Blog, Sidewalk Talk:

Motivated largely by political factors and local business interests, Pittsburgh leaders pushed for an end to its gathering ban before the state health department believed it was safe to do so. As a result Pittsburgh suffered a devastating second wave of the Spanish flu. The city ended with “the worst rate of ‘excess’ deaths among American cities: 807 per 100,000 people.

Will policymakers make the same mistake dealing with violence as their predecessors had with pandemic disease—prematurely abandoning what works?

In 2019, crime rates were at historic lows. Then came the call to “defund the police; empty the jails; abolish the death penalty; and generally be less punitive.”

The bigger concern is not treating gun violence in this country as a public health crisis and doing the necessary research to find out what works and what doesn’t.

Megan L. Ranney, MD MPH, an emergency physician and Associate Dean of Strategy and Innovation at the Brown University School of Public Health wrote in TIME this spring: “We must meet this challenge [gun violence] by approaching firearm injury as a public health epidemic, rather than a debate about gun rights or control.”

The nation is now in the midst of a historically large increase in murder.

According to The Intercept, the largest recorded one-year rise in murders in U.S. history was a 12.7 percent increase in 1968. Last year, data from law enforcement agencies released by the FBI, running through September, shows murders up 21 percent nationally.

According to The Atlantic, at the beginning of the 21st century, homicide began a substantial decline resulting in a 42 percent drop nationwide, as compared to the mid-1980s. For instance, murders plummeted by 75 percent in New York City alone. Crime rates continued to fall, making America’s streets the safest they had been since crime rates were first recorded.

The ‘Era of Lawfulness’

What was astonishing about this era of “lawfulness” was that no one could pinpoint why it was happening. The theories were endless—more police on the streets; the demise of crack cocaine; increased incarceration; abortion; the eradication of lead-based products; and the fortification of American homes.

However, there’s no real consensus among scholars about what caused crime rates to plummet.

How can that be?

For one thing, in 1996, the Dickey Amendment was passed. The amendment, introduced by then-Rep. Jay Dickey (R-Ark), required that “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”

According to Dr. Ranney:

[G]overnment-funded research on the public health approach to firearm injury prevention has been 50-100 times smaller by dollars spent than for diseases and injuries that kill a similar number of people. And that means that we have had no reliable data on gun injuries, and minimal data on deaths.

If we don’t know why violent crime fell, how will we ever figure out why it’s climbing— and climbing fast?

Robert Boyce, the retired chief of detectives for the New York Police Department, told The Atlantic, the yearlong push to reform, defund and, in some instances, abolish the police in the wake of George Floyd’s killing has cast a cloud over the nation’s police departments.

Some criminologists suggest the spike in violence is due to the hesitancy among residents to turn to the police for help. Others suggest that the police, fed up with the negative feedback form the public and the media, have begun to drag their feet, slowing the process of responding and investigating crime.

“When police legitimacy is greatly reduced, you get more crime because people are no longer relying on the criminal justice system for assistance,” Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, told The New York Times.

“People are less willing to cooperate with police in investigations, less willing to report crimes or other problems to the police, and more willing to take matters into their own hands.”

Miami Police Chief Art Acevedo said recently on CBS’s Face the Nation, “I am very sad to say that this summer is going to be a long summer for the American people.”

We may not be able to do much about this summer, but we can start by acknowledging gun violence as a public health crisis. 

This year, after more than three decades, resources are returning to the CDC for the study of gun-related violence.

For the last 18 months Americans have been admonished to follow the science. That’s apt advice for the criminal justice system as well.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. in New Castle, PA. He is the author of The Executioner’s Toll, 2010. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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Drug overdoses continue to rise nationwide

 Even as the state races to vaccinate thousands of Pennsylvanians against COVID-19, public health officials are still waging an ongoing fight against substance abuse, reported the Pennsylvania Capital-Star.

Preliminary data compiled by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that 88,295 people nationwide died from a drug overdose between August 2019 and August 2020, a 27 percent increase from the previous year, NBC News-Montana reported. Opioids and synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl, were responsible for most of the fatalities, according to NBC News.

In Pennsylvania, the number of reported deaths increased by 17.1 percent during that August to August timeframe, from 4,277 in 2019 to 5,008 in 2020, the CDC data showed.

To help combat that wave of abuse, the state Department of Drug and Alcohol Services has announced that it will award $2.7 million in grants to what are known as "recover community groups" that help people who are in recovery from substance use disorder.

Such groups are "non-profit organizations led and governed by representatives of local communities of recovery. These organizations are comprised of staff and volunteers from the recovery community," DDAP spokesperson Alison Gantz told the Capital-Star in an email. The RASE Project in Harrisburg is an example of such a group. 

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GateHouse: This country’s other growing and deadly epidemic

Matthew T. Mangino

GateHouse Media

May 8, 2020

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have been engrossed in a battle to control an epidemic in this country that in 2018 alone took 67,367 lives. The epidemic is not a new strain of influenza, Ebola or some other deadly infectious disease. The epidemic is drug abuse resulting in overdose deaths.

According to the CDC, drug overdoses are the leading cause of accidental death in the United States. Nearly 70% of the 67,367 deaths in 2018 involved an opioid. Opioid addiction is the driving force behind the epidemic.

Ironically, the birth of the opioid epidemic can be traced to an effort to help people fight chronic pain. OxyContin, a time-release pain reliever, was approved by the government in 1995 and launched for use in the U.S. in 1996. FDA approval was granted to Purdue Pharma, a family-owned business, because of the drug’s 12-hour time-release component. At the time those suffering from chronic pain only had temporary relief every four hours. Within a couple of years, OxyContin exploded onto the illicit drug scene. The time-release aspect of OxyContin was easily defeated by chewing or crushing the tablet - causing a powerful high. Purdue had the opportunity to stop the supply of OxyContin to offices and clinics across the country that were serving as nothing more than pill mills generating enormous profit and providing very little medical care.

Purdue Pharma is a privately held company owned by the Sackler family. Late last year, the family agreed to pay $3 billion over the next seven years to victims’ families, reported the New York Times.

Some of the states with the highest rates of death due to drug overdose are West Virginia (51.5 per 100,000), Pennsylvania (36.1 per 100,000) and Ohio (35.9 per 100,000). The magnitude of the opioid epidemic comes into focus when one compares the overdose deaths with the current COVID-19 death rate in those states, West Virginia (2.7 per 100,000), Pennsylvania (22.6 per 100,000) and Ohio (8.9 per 100,000).

The CDC acknowledges that a pandemic in the midst of an epidemic can be catastrophic. Opioid-related deaths are on the rise during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Brittany Shultz, a substance abuse specialist with the York County Opioid Collaborative in central Pennsylvania explained to WHP-TV in Harrisburg how “a combination of fears and increased isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to the rise in overdose deaths.”

Restrictions on movement may lead those with a substance abuse disorder to opt to purchase drugs from less trusted sources, raising the risk of overdosing on drugs that may be stronger than anticipated or tainted.

Narcan, an opioid overdose antidote, has been hailed as a miracle drug. The drug administered by medical staff, police officers and even fellow drug users have pulled people out of a deadly overdose by administering an easy-to-use antidote.

Even in spite of readily available Narcan, overdoses continue to rise. Some suggest that drug users locked down in their homes during the pandemic don’t have friends to call for help or to administer an antidote.

The COVID-19 pandemic has complicated the lives of those in recovery. The loss of employment and social relationships has caused considerable mental health hardship to those already vulnerable to risky behavior.

While this country wages war and dedicates enormous attention and resources to this mysterious and deadly virus, and rightfully so, this country cannot afford to ignore a killer that has been with us for years and will continue to plague America for years to come.
Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book “The Executioner’s Toll, 2010” was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter at @MatthewTMangino.

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PBS: Over 70 percent of tested inmates in federal prisons have COVID-19

The response from the federal Bureau of Prisons to the growing COVID-19 crisis in prisons has raised alarm among advocates and lawmakers about whether the agency is doing enough to ensure the safety of the nearly 150,000 inmates serving time in federal facilities, reported PBS.

And even though officials have stressed infection and death rates inside prisons are lower compared with outside, new figures provided by the Bureau of Prisons show that out of 2,700 tests systemwide, nearly 2,000 have come back positive, strongly suggesting there are far more COVID-19 cases left uncovered.

At the same time, the Bureau of Prisons communication policies are leaving families in the dark about their loved ones’ potentially life-threatening condition.

The 59-year-old Fleming had been serving a 20-year sentence on a drug conspiracy charge. The Bureau of Prisons never notified Fleming’s family that he was taken to a hospital or when his condition declined.

“Not having the opportunity to say goodbye — that would’ve been invaluable,” the younger Fleming said. “We will never have that chance.”

Under Bureau of Prisons policy, the agency is supposed to “promptly” notify the family of inmates who have serious illnesses. But the agency, which confirmed the family wasn’t initially notified, has “discretion when making notifications,” according to a spokeswoman.
Prisons officials say they are doing the best they can under dire circumstances and following guidelines set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“We are doing the right things to manage our population and to keep them as safe as possible at this time when we can’t provide that assurance to our average American free public that everyone is safe and secure right now with this pandemic,” said Kathy Hawk Sawyer, a senior adviser at the Bureau of Prisons who previously ran the agency twice.

As of Wednesday, 30 inmates, including Fleming, had died of the coronavirus at federal correctional facilities since late March. About 600 have recovered.

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Opioid crisis is impacting life expectancy in the U.S.

This week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published an analysis showing the opioid crisis has actually negatively impacted life expectancy in the U. S.  The analysis, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, crunched the numbers recorded by the National Vital Statistics System Mortality file, a storehouse of death data from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, from between 2000 to 2015.

According to the Washington Post, the analysis found that the average American’s life expectancy grew overall from 2000 to 2015, but that the astounding rise in opioid-related deaths shaved 2.5 months off this improvement. That’s .21 years, compared to the .02 years taken off the average life expectancy by alcohol overdoses.

No factor negatively affected life expectancy more. “It really underlines how serious the problem of opioid overdose has become in the U.S.,” the CDC’s Deborah Dowell told Time. “In general we don’t see decreases in life expectancy attributable to a single cause that are of this magnitude.” While overdose deaths in general in the U.S. more than doubled in that 15-year span, opioid overdoses more than tripled, the study reported. The average life expectancy for an American born in 2010 was 76.8 years, which grew to 78.8 years in 2015. The study suggested that but for opioid-related deaths, it would have been higher still.

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Grim milestone: In 2015 more died from heroin than guns

Opioid deaths continued to surge in 2015, surpassing 30,000 for the first time in recent history, according to CDC reported the Washington Post.

That marks an increase of nearly 5,000 deaths from 2014. Deaths involving powerful synthetic opiates, like fentanyl, rose by nearly 75 percent from 2014 to 2015.

In a grim milestone, more people died from heroin-related causes than from gun homicides in 2015. As recently as 2007, gun homicides outnumbered heroin deaths by more than 5 to 1.

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