Fla. Data: 4 in 10 in Hospital After Being Shot Are Gun Accident Victims

Dec. 15--It's not armed robbers or warring gangs who send the greatest percentage of gunshot survivors to Florida emergency rooms.

It's people who shoot someone, or themselves, accidentally.

Four out of every 10 people who are rushed to a Florida hospital or emergency room with a nonfatal wound were shot by accident, according to hospital data collected by the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration and published by the Florida Department of Health.

It's a far bigger problem in Florida than elsewhere -- double the national average the past three years -- according to numbers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In Orange County, it's even worse: More than half of the people treated for nonfatal gunshot injuries last year were shot accidentally.

"I think it should be a call to action, if it's higher than the rest of the country," said Dr. George Ralls, who as Orange County's medical director oversees about 2,000 emergency medical technicians and paramedics.

"This is a really high proportion," said Dr. Judy Schaechter, researcher and interim director of pediatrics at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. "People don't seem to understand that this happens."

Guns have received an enormous amount of attention in the wake of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in which 20 first-graders and six adults were killed by a lone gunman a year ago.

Most of the attention, though, has focused on gun deaths -- but guns hurt far more people every year than they kill.

'The gun just went off'

Mario Whitehead spends much of his day in a hospital bed near the front window of his family's home in south Orlando. The 17-year-old is paralyzed from the ribs down.

He was wounded in an accidental shooting Jan. 21 in Willie Mays Park while playing basketball with friends, including Takim Rashad Neal, then 17.

Witnesses told police that Neal had pulled a black .380-caliber handgun out of his right pocket and was playing with it.

Then "the gun just went off, and I fell down," Mario said. The bullet tore into his right shoulder near his collarbone.

He felt no pain then, he said, and feels none now.

Neal was charged with carrying a concealed firearm, culpable negligence and violating the state's ban on minors possessing a gun. He pleaded no contest in July and is awaiting sentencing.

Mario is a senior at Oak Ridge High School. He lives with his parents and extended family but is capable of bathing himself, getting breakfast and preparing himself for class.

He describes himself as "happy, well-adjusted. ... I don't hold a grudge. I forgive him."

There are steep costs to providing medical care to victims such as Mario.

Florida hospitals and emergency rooms last year chalked up more than $57 million in charges for accidental-gunshot survivors, according to AHCA. The average accidental-gunshot patient admitted to a hospital required $85,024 in care, according to the agency, and half of that was borne by government providers such as Medicare and Medicaid.

How does Florida compare?

No central clearinghouse provides accidental-gun-injury numbers by state, so it's impossible to say how Florida ranks compared with others.

CDC officials would not comment on the Orlando Sentinel's findings, warning that, unlike Florida, which uses a direct count of each gunshot injury treated in a hospital, their numbers were estimates based on data samples drawn from 66 hospitals across the nation.

Florida Surgeon General John H. Armstrong also would not comment. He is the state official charged with overseeing public-health policy and runs the agency that annually publishes accidental-gunshot-injury numbers.

Lisa VanderWerf-Hourigan, director of the Florida Department of Health's injury-prevention program, said motor-vehicle crashes and falls kill far more Floridians than gun accidents, making them a category on which her agency does not focus.

Marion Hammer, former president of the National Rifle Association and the group's chief lobbyist in Florida, said she was wary of the Florida numbers because gunshot victims sometimes lie about how they were hurt.

Data from hospitals, she said, may be unreliable. That was a criticism shared by others, including Dr. Jan Garavaglia, chief medical examiner for Orange and Osceola counties.

Like Florida, many states collect data from hospitals. In California, which has more-restrictive gun laws, the proportion of accidental gun injuries in 2011 -- 29 percent -- was well below Florida's 40 percent.

Illinois, which also has tougher gun laws than Florida's, had a higher incidence of nonfatal-gunshot accidents that same year: 53 percent.

On a per-capita basis, Orange County emergency rooms have ranked No. 1 or 2 in Florida in the number of nonfatal-gunshot victims treated in the state's largest urban areas from 2007 to 2011, according to state Health Department reports.

The overwhelming majority are taken to Orlando Regional Medical Center, which has a Level I trauma unit staffed by doctors, nurses and technicians specially trained to deal with those types of injuries. It serves trauma victims from five counties, and that may puff up Orange County's numbers, said Dr. John Promes, the hospital's trauma-unit director.

He has treated gunshot victims with wounds to "their arms, legs, their head, their torso, I've seen it everywhere," said Promes, who urges gun owners to take a safety class. "It's no different than a seat belt. Your chance of injury goes down dramatically."

No public agency in Central Florida -- not the Orange County Sheriff's Office, the Orlando Police Department, local branches of the state Health Department or the Florida Safety Council -- routinely holds classes on gun safety.

"Might that be a gap?" asked Ralls, Orange County's medical director. "Maybe."

Orlando police Chief Paul Rooney blamed the high Orange County numbers on the prevalence of weapons here.

"Obviously, if you have a higher rate of firearms in a state or county or city, there's going to be a higher rate of nonfatal gun accidents," he said.

But it's not clear how many households in Orange County and Florida have guns.

Congress has banned collection of gun-ownership data, making it impossible to know how prevalent guns are. However, surveys done by the CDC from 2001 to 2004, before gun research was further restricted, put the number of Florida homes with guns at about 26 percent, lower than the 33 percent national average.

In the years since, however, the number of concealed-weapons permits in Florida has tripled since 2005 to a bit more than 1 million. In Orange County there are 53,000.

Rooney urged gun owners to be responsible, to know at all times where their weapons are and to properly secure them. Officers, he said, are finding and seizing too many stolen guns.

Academic researchers who studied household-gun-ownership data recommended in an article published in the medical journal "Pediatrics" in 2005 that public-health officials encourage families to store firearms safely and that doctors, especially pediatricians, talk with parents about that.

Florida lawmakers, however, voted in 2011 to ban doctors from asking patients about gun ownership. A court later overturned the law.

Schaechter, the University of Miami pediatrician, is one of several plaintiffs challenging the law in court.

"We know how to prevent this," Schaechter said. "We should be reducing access to loaded firearms."

rstutzman@tribune.com or 407-650-6394

Tips for gun-owning parents

Orlando attorney Richard Schwamm serves on the board at Children's Safety Village, a Central Florida nonprofit that works to keep children safe from all kinds of hazards. He often talks to parents, churches, synagogues and youth groups about gun safety.

He urged parents who own guns to take several basic safety steps:

--Tell your children that you have a gun in the house.

--Explain the difference between a real gun and a toy gun and make sure they understand the ramifications of a real gun being discharged.

--Teach them not to touch guns, that if they find one to leave the area and tell an adult.

--Lock the gun away in a safe place.

--Store the gun unloaded, and store its ammunition in a separate place.

Rene Stutzman

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