A new study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests people are more likely to die from gunshot wounds than they were a decade ago.
Dr. Ernest Moore is a renowned trauma surgeon and vice chairman for research at the University of Colorado. He is the first to admit his study isn’t conclusive because it’s limited to a single trauma center in Denver.
But he blames greater use of military style assault weapons, like the AR-15-type gun wielded by the Orlando shooter. They tend to cause more serious, and multiple, wounds, Moore says.
“It isn’t as much the missile as it is, in these mass shootings, as the capability of discharging multiple rounds in a rapid sequence.”
Moore thinks society would be safer with an assault weapons ban. But he says he can’t prove it because the gun lobby holds sway over Congress.
“One of the problems in bringing this gun violence under control, as you know, is we’ve not had the federal funding to do the research we really need to document this.”
According to his study, the death rate from gunshot wounds at the trauma center increased an average of 6 percent every two years between 2000 and 2013.
