As the last post (“A Costly Problem”) in my ongoing series on gun violence pointed out, gun violence is again on the rise in the United States.  If your life has never been personally affected, then perhaps you might say “that’s somebody else’s problem.”  Think again.  By one estimate published in JAMA, 67% of the societal spending as a result of gun violence comes out of your pocket and mine: 49% is paid by government (and we all know where that money comes from), and another 18% comes from increased insurance premiums.¹ The total reaches $3.1 billion per year.  And that’s just medical costs.  We still haven’t factored in investigation, prosecution, incarceration and broader economic costs.  (More on that in a future post.)

What would society be willing to pay to eliminate this $3.1 billion a year medical cost?  It turns out that two of the authors of that JAMA article tried to estimate it in a previous article in the Harvard Health Policy Review, which I wasn’t aware of when I made my previous posting.  According to their article, Duke professor Peter J. Cook and University of Chicago Professor Jens Ludwig believe the number was perhaps as high as $100 billion in 1998 (or $125 billion in my back-of-the-envelope estimate of 2008 dollars).² Here’s there logic:  in a 1998 study conducted by the National Opinion Research Center, the thousand US households surveyed were, on average, willing to spend an additional $239 dollars each to reduce gun violence by 30% in their state.  Do a little math using 2008 dollars³ and 2008 households⁴ and get:

$34 billion.  How do we get to $120 billion?  The above calculation reflects what the US households would be individually willing to pay to reduce gun violence by 30%.  Assuming a linear increase in willingness to pay to reduce by 100%, the Cook and Ludwig suggest the tab looks like this:

(In fairness, I have some concerns about this extrapolation.  Saying I am willing to spend $239—or $303 in today’s dollars—to reduce gun violence by 30% does not necessarily mean I’m willing to spend $1,010 to eliminate it completely.  And certainly, as the authors point out, there may be some real costs to eliminating gun violence by 100% that a linear extrapolation will not account for, even if I were willing to pay for it.  Nevertheless, if the precise figure is wrong, surely the scale is not.)

Add to this $113 billion the roughly $10-20 billion annually in costs attendant to suicides and gun-related accidents and you land somewhere between $123 billion and $133 billion—call it $125 billion in nice round figures.  That’s a big number no matter how you look at it:  it roughly equals the combined annual budgets for the US Department of Health and Human Services and the US Department of Education, or somewhat more surprisingly, the combined annual budgets of the US Department of Homeland Security, Department of Energy, Department of Justice, Department of Agriculture, Department of Transportation, and NASA.⁵  (By the way, think this is an abstract comparison?  Perhaps, but remember:  we pay for all of these government agencies, so we already perceive their value, just as we perceive a value in reducing gun violence.)

If all this talk of big numbers is giving you a headache, the good news is there are simpler and more cost-effective solutions than seeking the American peoples’ collective budgetary allocation for half again as many federal agencies as they’re already funding.  Take a look at simple and effective programs like Speak Up! and Ask!, both run by my friends at PAX, which seek to eliminate school gun violence by encouraging kids to speak up if they know of something which might happen (in the case of Speak Up!) and encourage parents to ask if the houses at which their children are playing contain guns (in the case of Ask!).  These are fabulously cost-effective programs, and their results (here and here) are speak for themselves.

1. Philip J. Cook; Bruce A. Lawrence; Jens Ludwig; Ted R. Miller The Medical Costs of Gunshot Injuries in the United States JAMA. 1999;282(5):447-454. [↩]
2. Philip J. Cook; Jens Ludwig; The Costs and Benefits of Reducing Gun Violence Harvard Health Policy Review. 2001; Vol 2, No. 2. [↩]
3. http://www.westegg.com/inflation/infl.cgi [↩]
4. Day, Jennifer Cheeseman, Projections of the Number of Households and Families in the United States: 1995 to 2010, U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, P25-1129, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1996 [↩]
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget [↩]