Each year, Utah sees its share of accidental injuries caused by firearms. When state health officials looked carefully at the hundreds of injuries that required emergency treatment in hospitals, they found most resulted from lapses in the most basic elements of gun safety.
Nearly three-quarters of all unintentional injuries in the state are to males between the ages of 15 and 44, most of whom accidentally shoot themselves while mishandling or cleaning the weapons. With funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Utah streamlined its data collection on gun injuries and used that information to create a public service campaign to help prevent accidental gun injuries.
But getting to that point required a compromise to a 1996 federal rule that prohibits the CDC from using federal funds to advocate or promote gun control.
The amendment made access to granular information — things like who is being injured by firearms and the circumstances that caused those injuries — difficult to come by for health officials, policymakers and politicians. It would often take a year or longer to get such statistics as they worked their way from hospitals and through the public health bureaucracy. That has frustrated efforts to address the tens of thousands of gun deaths that occur in the United States each year.
Starting in 2020, however, nine states and the District of Columbia have received money from the CDC to set up pilot programs to speed the dissemination of this data, with the goal of using it for better public health approaches to the problem.
The near real-time data gleaned through the Firearm Injury Surveillance Through Emergency Rooms (FASTER) program spurred Utah to launch its public service campaign three years ago. Parsing age data and type of nonfatal injury, which includes intentional self-directed, unintentional, and assault-related, "helped with the messaging," says Joel Johnson, communication coordinator for the Violence and Injury Prevention Program at the state's Department of Health and Human Services.