The High Cost of Getting Shot

Gun control is now a perfect issue for fiscal conservatives. The cost of treating the nation's gunshot victims is about $2.3 billion annually, a new study estimates, and taxpayers, for the most part, are picking up the tab. The study, published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that of that total - which breaks down to about $17,000 per gunshot wound - the government pays about half. Private insurers covered 18 percent of the cost (passing much of it along to other patients), and victims themselves paid for another 19 percent.

Admittedly, $2.3 billion may not seem like much when tax cuts cost $800 billion and health care en toto runs up a $1 trillion tab. But it's almost exactly the same amount that this freedom-lovin' nation spends on guns each year. Couldn't that mean that the government, by tirelessly cleaning up after shootings, is actually subsidizing the gun industry by softening its impact on human life? (If the death toll from guns suddenly, say, quadrupled because of inadequate hospital care, how long would the NRA stay in business on K Street?) This anti-libertarian streak has to bother somebody in the GOP (maybe Forbes?). The comedian Chris Rock offered up a just-crazy-enough theory recently that "bullet control" was the way to go - if bullets cost, say, $5,000 each, there'd be a whole lot less shooting going on. Less wounding too.