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Gun violence leads to huge health-care costs. Gun violence has to be kept in the public's sight if we're ever going to do better than we're doing now as a country.
There's more reason to treat gun violence as a public-health issue. Gun injuries result in billions of dollars of health-care costs, which affects not just the injured or killed but often takes money that hospitals might use for other patients.
A new Stanford University study focused on the health-care costs of gun injuries and found that from 2006 to 2014 Americans paid more than $6.6 billion to treat victims of gunshots. That's without counting long-term care or rehabilitation.
The study, published last week in the American Journal of Public Health, could easily be lost in the unending stream of bizarre behavior emanating from Washington, D.C. We have to keep our eyes on Washington, but without losing sight of the many other problems that need to be dealt with.
Read More: Health-care costs should spur action on guns