Alyssa Silver's interest in studying gun-related injuries in kids was prompted by her son's reaction to a t-shirt. When he was in kindergarten, she bought him a glow-in-the-dark dinosaur shirt. But instead of being excited, he was cautious. "He was nervous to wear it because in school they do drills where they have to hide in the corner with the lights off in case bad people with guns are in the building. He is afraid if his shirt glows the bad people will see him," says Silver, who is an attending physician and assistant professor of pediatrics at the Children's Hospital at Montefiore/Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City."This was heartbreaking to me, so I wanted to look into the true scope of the problem and raise awareness of the need to stop this epidemic of gun violence in our country," she says. Gun violence in the United States is notoriously difficult to study, in part because of a 20-year-old Congressional ban on funding for research that might be seen as advocating for gun control. The hyper-charged political atmosphere around guns has also made public-health researchers leery of wading into the fray—though that may be changing.This weekend, Silver will be adding to the data on gun violence when she presents a paper which found that more than 5,800 American children were hospitalized as a result of gun injuries in 2012—that's roughly 16 kids a day, or one every 90 minutes. And it doesn't include those who died without being admitted to the hospital, like the 20 kids who were murdered in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.Continue reading on Tonic.
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