Medical costs and lost productivity quickly add up, researchers said.
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Yocom, who authored the report, acknowledged that since this is one of the first studies that the federal government has done on the subject and it's going to take more time to determine if these costs have grown over the decades or will rise more in the future.But the initial medical bill is still just a tiny fraction of the overall costs, other researchers found.
Although the GAO report didn't go beyond initial hospital costs, other researchers have used public data to calculate what they say is a more complete picture of the overall costs.
This is not to mention the psychological costs, the mental toll it takes on family, community members and witnesses to the violence. For gun violence deaths between 2015 and 2019, a total of 4,538,512 years of potential life were lost from 194,130 gun deaths, the CDC found. That is an average of 23.3 years lost for each gun death over the five years, the highest number for all causes of unnatural death, according to the agency.