'75,000 US youths sent to emergency rooms in 9 yrs for gun violence'

Some 75,000 youths under the age of 18 were sent to US emergency rooms due to gun violence from 2006 to 2014, at a cost of some $2.5 billion, researchers said Monday.

That's the equivalent of around 8,300 cases per year, according to the study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Pediatrics.

The number of youths wounded by gunfire declined in the first years of the study, then rose from 2013 to 2014. Most the casualties were boys aged 15-17.

Researchers found that about 11 under 18s per 100,000 were sent to emergency rooms due to gunshot wounds.

Half of cases were linked to a dispute of some kind, while 39 per cent were accidents and two percent were suicides.

One third were hospitalised, and six percent were killed.