Joe Biden
(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

Treating firearm-related injuries in the U.S. costs more than $1 billion annually, with public health programs like Medicaid picking up most of the tab, according to new Government Accountability Office estimates shared with POLITICO.

The assessment was requested by House and Senate Democrats last year and comes as the Biden administration is encouraging cities to spend unused Covid relief funds to address gun violence.

The nonpartisan GAO found gun violence accounts for about 30,000 hospital stays and about 50,000 emergency room visits annually. More than 15 percent of firearm injury survivors are also readmitted at least once after initial treatment, costing an additional $8,000 to $11,000 per patient. Because the majority of victims are poor, the burden largely falls on safety-net programs like Medicaid, including covering some of the care for the uninsured.

The report, the first of its kind from the watchdog agency, is based available data on caring for people who suffer non-fatal gun injuries each year. It’s expected to fuel Democrats’ calls for expanded background checks amid a stalemate on gun control legislation.

— Alice Miranda Olstein and Nicholas Wu in Health costs of gun violence exceed $1 billion a year, GAO says

76 COMMENTS

  1. The obvious answer would be to stop covering gang bangers under Medicaid and have them get coverage from their employers…

    • You may not be too far off. I could see some Dim proposing to extend workers’ comp coverage to this classification.

    • The obvious approach would be to teach them to shoot. If they would finish the job, no hospital stays.

    • And if they don’t get coverage but can afford to drive around in a BMW or Mercedes, then charge them an extra $1,000 every year on their tax return.

    • EXCERPT from Suter EA, Waters WC 4th, Murray GB, Hopkins CB, Asiaf J, Moore JB, Fackler M, Cowan DN, Eckenhoff RG, Singer TR, et al.
      Violence in America. Effective solutions.
      J Med Assoc Ga. 1995 Jun;84(6):253-63. Review. No abstract available.
      PMID: 7616135 [PubMed – indexed for MEDLINE]:

      Economic analysis
      The actual economic cost of medical care for gun violence is approximately $1.5-billion per year – about 0.16% of America’s $900-billion annual health care costs. To exaggerate the costs of gun violence, the advocates of gun prohibition routinely include estimates of lost lifetime earnings – assuming that gangsters, drug dealers, and rapists would be as socially productive as teachers, factory workers, and other good Americans – to generate inflated claims of $20-billion or more in “costs.”32 One recent study went so far as to claim the “costs” of work time lost while workers gossip about gun violence.
      What evidence is there that the average homicide decedent can be fairly compared to the average worker, that average wages should be attributed to homicide victims? What fraction of homicide victims are actually “innocent children” who strayed into gunfire? Far from being pillars of society, more than two-thirds of gun homicide “victims” are involved with drug trafficking or have evidence of ante-mortem illicit drug use. , In one study, 67% of 1990 homicide “victims” had a criminal record, averaging 4 arrests for 11 offenses.35 Such active criminals cost society not only untold human suffering, but also an average economic toll of $400,000 per criminal per year before apprehension and $25,000 per criminal per year while in prison.” It is not a slander on the few truly innocent – and highly sensationalized – victims to note that the overwhelming predominance of homicide “victims” are as predatory and socially aberrant as the perpetrators of homicide. Cost-benefit analysis is necessarily a bit hardhearted, and, though repugnant for physicians to consider monetary savings alone, the advocates of gun prohibition routinely force us to address the “costs” of gun violence. So, we are forced to notice that, in cutting their violent “careers” short, the gun deaths of those predators and criminals may actually represent an economic savings to society on the order of $4.5 billion annually – three times the declared “costs” of guns.
      Those annual cost savings are only a small fraction of the total economic savings from guns, because the $4.5 billion does not include the additional financial savings from the innocent lives saved, injuries prevented, medical costs averted, and property protected by guns. If we applied the prohibitionists’ methods33 to compute the savings by guns, we would find that the annual savings approach $1/2 trillion, about 10% of the US Gross Domestic Product. We perform this exercise only to demonstrate that all such “virtual reality” estimates of “indirect” costs and savings are inflated and to condemn them all as meaningless.
      Whether by human or economic measure, we conclude that guns offer a substantial net benefit to our society. Some “quality of life” benefits, such as the feeling of security and self-determination that accompany protective gun ownership, are not easily quantified. There is no competent research that suggests making good citizens’ access to guns more difficult (whether by bureaucratic paperwork, exorbitant taxation, zoning laws, contrived application of environmental or consumer product safety statutes, reframing the debate as a “public health” issue, or outright bans – the current tactics of the anti-self-defense lobby ) will reduce violence. No matter what tactics are used by the anti-self-defense lobby to incrementally achieve citizen disarmament, it is only good citizens who comply with gun laws, so it is only good citizens who are disarmed by gun laws. As evidenced by jurisdictions with the most draconian gun laws (e.g. New York City, Washington, DC, etc.), disarming these good citizens before violence is reduced causes more harm than good. Disarming these good citizens costs more – not fewer – lives.

      • “It is not a slander on the few truly innocent – and highly sensationalized – victims to note that the overwhelming predominance of homicide “victims” are as predatory and socially aberrant as the perpetrators of homicide.“

        Now there is quite the assertion, the “overwhelming predominance of homicide victims” are thugs.

        Might you have an actual data point to support that claim?

        • The Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission 2014-15 reports over 83% of murder victims had criminal records. JAMA 2017’s “The Association of Firearm Caliber With Likelihood of Death From Gunshot Injury in Criminal Assaults” is a study of Boston over 5 years. 90% of murder victims average over 11 arraignments meaning they were charged by a judge for a crime.

        • Hutson HR, Anglin D, and Pratss MJ. Adolescents and children injured or killed in drive-by shootings in Los Angeles. N Engl J Med. 1994; 330: 324-27.

        • Philly Baltimore and Wilmington for PA MD and DE respectively are all within the range of that claim over 30 years of data collected and were primary fields of study for criminal justice degrees in the midatlantic states. For upstate NY we have been seeing 80+% of shooting victims have a lengthly criminal record and nearly half with gang affiliation which is remarkable as we do not have gang violence in NY merely “people with group associations committing violence”. Doublespeak is fun but your questioning of well established crime statistics will be a difficult push especially for just the last 20 years of FBI data. I will exclude the 90’s because it was remarkably higher on criminal on criminal gang violence and a bit of an outlier decade.

      • To Mr. Suter’s well-researched and informative insights on murder, I’d add that no one can be a “victim” of his own choices, and those (suicide attempts) account for a large majority of “gun violence”. Reimbursing people who try to throw their lives away is like burglary detectives retrieving belongings from the dump for people who change their minds.

        I’d love to see someone re-run the numbers, including estimates for all the crimes NOT committed and social services NOT consumed by every unstable and/or entitled-victim POS who successfully confers the benefits of Nature’s Fusebox on his community.

  2. This doesn’t tell me that firearms are costing us a billion. It tells me that the Perpetually-Dependent crowd is costing us even more than we realized. They already consume a SIGNIFICANTLY disproportionate share of emergency services, assistance, social program grants, etc, while contributing almost nothing to the pot. Now we know their behavior costs us an extra billion each year.

      • Yes indeed tom…Instead of not looking at far more costly lawsuits attributed to malpractice and sloppy hospital healthcare and the democRat Party you zeroed in on gangs and ended it there. Perhaps it is gangs running wild in democRat strongholds where the residents have nothing but demoCrap for brains and know no better?

        If it were not for some mental deficiency it should be obvious to those who think like you tom that the democRat Party has stolen the lessons behind Content of Character from the people who need it most. So never mind gangs that you see floating on the surface go deep where today’s democRat plantation slaves are there to harvest votes. The fact is any “Content of Character” on the plantation stands in the way of harvesting votes for trinket promising democRats.

        So next time tom don’t be a narrow minded jerk looking down your nose at others who may not be as fortunate as you and forget all about including the democRat Party slave masters who run the show.

    • TomT,
      Exactly! Socialism’s premise of everybody paying in so we can all benefit from social services is a double-barreled lie.

      Nearly half the population pays no income taxes; more if you count those whose annual “contributions” are less than they spend in a month on cigarettes and beer, non-working dependents, etc.

      Meanwhile, the chances of the people who pay nearly all the taxes ever needing or collecting entitlements is somewhere between zero and infinitesimal. It’s the same degenerates on the teat from cradle to grave.

  3. Maybe Biden should get a bit more focused on who is doing the vast majority of shooting. In Jackson,MS yesterday:

    “The victim, “Mike”, operates a door-service business. He finished a job in south Jackson and got on to Highway 18 to go home. He was in the right lane at the stop light just before the I-20E entrance ramp.

    As Mike drove onto the ramp, a car on his left swerved over and tried to run him off the road. He waved his arm so they could see him. The car was a four-door royal blue sedan with a bumper held in place by black tape. The windows were tinted. Both windows on the right side of the car rolled down, revealing four black men in the car.

    One of the men pointed a shotgun at him and fired. Mike said it was a 12 gauge shotgun with a muzzle brake. Buckshot struck his back and neck as shown in the photo posted above. A second shot missed him. Frightened but not frozen, Mike swerved off in the grass to get away from his assailants. The shooters sped away on the interstate. He said no words had been exchanged between the two vehicles nor had there been any display of road rage.

    Mike wondered if he was about to die as he felt blood gush down his neck. He tried to flag down motorists passing by. A nurse stopped, treated him, and called 911. A security guard stopped as well and took him to UMC. JPD met Mike at the hospital and interviewed him.

    Doctors removed most of the pellets. Thankfully, none of the pellets struck “anything vital.” The pellets that struck his neck would have killed him if any of them were 1 centimeter forward.

    Mike wondered if he was about to die as he felt blood gush down his neck. He tried to flag down motorists passing by. A nurse stopped, treated him, and called 911. A security guard stopped as well and took him to UMC. JPD met Mike at the hospital and interviewed him.

    Doctors removed most of the pellets. Thankfully, none of the pellets struck “anything vital.” The pellets that struck his neck would have killed him if any of them were 1 centimeter forward.

    One pellet remains near his spine but the physician said it shouldn’t be removed unless it became life-threatening or caused pain. “

  4. Not sure they’re gonna like it when gun-violence-cost-to-society and demographics are overlapped.

      • Eh we just see an increase in doublespeak from the news to cover whatever agenda is needed. City guns coming from irresponsible storage in rural areas (home invasion/burglary) or arms dealers spreading weapons of death (straw purchasing girlfriends/gang members without a record). Gets boring to see it spun up again but a lot more gun owners up here starting to realize it’s largely nonsense so it could get interesting if they have to change up the script or if some voting priorities begin to shift.

  5. Maybe Biden should get a bit more focused on who is doing the vast majority of shooting. In Jackson,MS yesterday:

    “The victim, “Mike”, operates a door-service business. He finished a job in south Jackson and got on to Highway 18 to go home. He was in the right lane at the stop light just before the I-20E entrance ramp.

    As Mike drove onto the ramp, a car on his left swerved over and tried to run him off the road. He waved his arm so they could see him. The car was a four-door royal blue sedan with a bumper held in place by black tape. The windows were tinted. Both windows on the right side of the car rolled down, revealing four black men in the car.

    One of the men pointed a shotgun at him and fired. Mike said it was a 12 gauge shotgun with a muzzle brake. Buckshot struck his back and neck as shown in the photo posted above. A second shot missed him. Frightened but not frozen, Mike swerved off in the grass to get away from his assailants. The shooters sped away on the interstate. He said no words had been exchanged between the two vehicles nor had there been any display of road rage.

    Mike wondered if he was about to die as he felt blood gush down his neck. He tried to flag down motorists passing by. A nurse stopped, treated him, and called 911. A security guard stopped as well and took him to UMC. JPD met Mike at the hospital and interviewed him.

    Doctors removed most of the pellets. Thankfully, none of the pellets struck “anything vital.” The pellets that struck his neck would have killed him if any of them were 1 centimeter forward.”

  6. Nothing development of more lethal projectiles won’t solve. Sounds like the gub’ment should provide gun owners ammo to keep their skills up. More center-mass hits would also help minimize those hospital costs…

    • I’ve often thought this, but then I stop and wonder if they only want you to think they’re idiots and they’re really diabolical geniuses. Reagan said ‘never attribute to malice what can easily be explained by incompetence’, but I suspect both are in play. I ain’t given up nothin either.

      • When State legal authority is involved it doesn’t matter if it is idiocy or genius there is a lot of laziness attached and it will be expensive to the taxpayer at all levels unless severely restricted.

  7. There is a price to be paid for NOT keeping the animals in their cages and a toll that come with gangs like MS13 and such. That’s not even to mention what BLM, Antifa, and NFAC does.

    • The only damage NFAC does is shooting their own members via negligence. They don’t loot and burn — they just incompetently hold peaceful, armed demonstrations. I don’t agree with their racial separatist policies and goals, but they shouldn’t wrongfully be lumped in with groups that have destroyed businesses and government property or assaulted citizens.

    • Mindset
      Sitting in a small class with the instructor telling us of getting early parole and what helps to get it.
      One was a job when released. I proudly stated I had a job( my boss said , ” For sure, I’ll hire you back) when released. ” And what is that?” The instructor ask. ” Working at the grain elevator.” I replied.
      Another individual loudly proclaimed he also had a job when released. Same question to him, and without missing a beat and with entire sincerity his answer was ” Stealing cars.”

  8. Doesn’t Obamacare cover things like this? /s
    $1B is nothing…look at it compared to $3.5T… 0.029% …a rounding error in many cases…

    • Leigh, we could have paid for healthcare for the people that really needed it instead of blowing trillions with nothing to show for it. I keep waiting for the socialist healthcare crowd to notice that but I haven’t heard a peep. They seem to just go along with whatever plan increases the power of The Party.

      • But healthcare is a right..or at least that is what the terminally brain dead regurgitate.

        • Exactly! No functioning mind could possibly believe something that not only requires a lot of others’ hard work, but also simply didn’t exist (in anything resembling its current form) for 98% of recorded human history, could be a “right”.

    • They’re borrowing it from future tax payers. What a complete joke. It makes me sick. We won’t even have anything good to show for it.

    • what do 7-800,000 abortions cost, too …just to throw it in the mix…they may be worth it, though

    • I looked that up the other day when the GAO report came out.
      The total costs for automobile accidents in the US are approximately 11 million PER DEATH (that is sum all the costs for injury, property etc, and divide by number of deaths).
      There are approximately 35-40k deaths related to automobiles annually in the US. That’s north of $400B or 400x the cost of firearms

  9. According to a NHTSA.gov report from 2010 the cost of automobile crashes totaled $242 billion. Of that 7% or $17 billion was at taxpayer expense. It only gets worse as that figure has now exceeded $300 billion. It’s estimated the taxpayer will be picking up the tab for over $21 billion. Of course there’s nothing for Democrats to gain from any of this so don’t hold your breath.

    • Rest assured that data will be used to fuel the coming push to restrict motor vehicle travel (especially of the internal combustion type) in the near future. They need to finish their ongoing press against air travel first.

      • Golly wouldn’t people protest possibly mostly peacefully…………..oh maybe that’s why this healthcare push.

  10. At the risk of sounding racist (and I am Caucasian so far as I can tell), perhaps Biden and his regime could tap BLM for some of the costs… As such it might actually ad some credibility to their title.

    Just sayin’

  11. When air travel(and personal vehicle travel) get too expensive for the small wage earners to use, it will be restricted to the only people that should use it, the political élite.

  12. Has the GAO published any data on how much money is saved each year by good-guys/gals with guns stopping bad-gus/gals from committing violence and property damage? Without context, the GAO’s cost numbers are useful ONLY for supporting incompetence and malice by lawmakers.

    Bi-partisan my butt. When you publish numbers from only one perspective, you create a bias.

  13. This is why government programs such as medicare, medicaid, social security and ‘Bamacare are the stepping stones to tyranny. Eventually it’s going to get to the point where the gubmint says “we won’t provide healthcare if you don’t get rid of your guns, celebrate sexual freaks, give your children up to the state, etc., etc., etc., etc.

    • “This is why government programs such as medicare, medicaid, social security and ‘Bamacare are the stepping stones to tyranny.”

      Yep, just look at Europe, countries like the UK, France, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, etc. have all had government programs such as healthcare, disability, retirement, etc. for decades and they’ve been ruled by tyrants for years.

      • You have seen how several major European countries have jailed people for tweets lately right? Your agenda needs work D- at best see me after class.

  14. The GAO may be non-partisan (dubious) but the sources from which they collected data for their cost-benefit analysis definitely aren’t.

  15. “Because the majority of victims are poor, the burden largely falls on…”

    Me, the American tax payer. I work overtime for this. How much overtime have they been putting in?

    • It’s not exactly overtime, more like flex scheduling….. get up around 2 or 3 in the afternoon, meet with a few “clients”, meet with co-workers to jack a coupla’ cars, a hit or two of your favorite ” mood enhancer “, knock up a coupla’ hoes, then sleep for ten or so hours. Am I Racist ? – nope, I’m Realist.

  16. Many (most?) legal gun owners seem puzzled at why the anti-gun mob insist on focusing on legal gun owners, rather than illegal gun owners. The answer is relatively simple, and immune to attack (or rather the desired results of attacks).

    Taking guns from legal gun owners removes the inexhaustible supply of guns for illegal gun owners. Destroy the supply chain, and the existing inventory shrinks. That shrinkage leads inexorably to fewer guns for criminals to use in crimes. Eventually, all the illegally acquired guns will fail (illegal gun owners don’t go to repair shops…which will disappear with the shutting off of legal gun supply). When all the guns fail, “gun crime” will cease. This line of dominos cannot be resisted.

    Once you integrate the above into your logic process, going after illegal gun owners becomes a non-starter for debate.

    Besides, with legal gun owners stripped of firearms, one can feel good about having done something. Which, in and of itself, is Kryptonite to bad guys who want to kill you.

    • The flaw in this ointment is that eradication of firearms will do nothing to reduce criminal violence. Exhibit AS: England. Humans are violent animals, and throughout recorded history and the archeological record, such as it is, there is a record of unmitigated violence of human on human. Without guns, other tools will be found, or rather reinvented.

      • The flaw in this ointment is that eradication of firearms will do nothing to reduce criminal violence.”

        Irrelevant. Eliminate guns, and you eliminate “gun crime”. General crime is acceptable, “gun crime” is not. General crime is OK, because oppression, or something.

      • The bigger flaw in this is the open southern border. You get rid of legal guns to steal then the cartels will step up and import illegal guns along with the narcotics and human trafficking. A whole new profit center to be exploited. Also since they are from an already illegal source they can step up the game with full auto, SBR’s, explosives, all sorts of fun for the gang bangers. Banning firearms in England worked fairly well because it is an island and the government keeps a tight rein on imports.

  17. That’s why we need more gun control, if you can’t put a perp down in one or two shots you need more practice and training!

  18. “That’s why we need more gun control, if you can’t put a perp down in one or two shots you need more practice and training!”

    A nice example of turning words back on themselves. However…..

    You miss entirely the point of Biden-Harris: all, as in ALL, of the cost of treating gunshot wounds directly attributable to of legal gun owners. If legal gun owners have no guns to own, the bad guys can’t own no guns.

  19. Itd be nice if the president could do something beneficial for His country.
    I’m seeing none of his campaign promises coming to fruition.

    • He promised to open the southern border and allow people to bypass our immigration system. He got to work on that the very first day. Oddly enough, this was barely discussed during the lead up to the election despite being Trump’s key issue in 2016.

      • I suppose a land full of low wage earning illegal immigrants will be beneficial in the future-?.

        • Yes, they are benefit to the democrats voter base. They will try and get them amnesty. They will give the anchor babies education, food stamps and SCHIP paid for by legal Americans where they kids will be indoctrinated. The parents will not know or realy care.
          The kids will vote for socialism, not even realizing the reason they are here was their parents ran from failed soscialist experiment counties.

  20. “I’m seeing none of his campaign promises coming to fruition.”

    Talking about stuff is doing stuff.

  21. “I suppose a land full of low wage earning illegal immigrants will be beneficial in the future-?.”

    Yes. They are all supposed to vote Dim, forever.

  22. Ah statistics. Funny how if you use them or those things called ‘facts’ in isolation (even when correct) you turn the quantitatively ‘scientific’ into the qualitatively absurd. They’re of course trying to make the same case for Federal legal intervention that was made for smoking, i.e. the cost to Federal healthcare programs. The key is what part of the problem is a lapse of personal responsibility and control vs. that contributed by some other agent an individual is not fully responsible for.

    My take is that the smoking issue was valid, and different in so many ways. One real life factor particularly being those commonly on juries (even in tobacco states) were finally ready to go into big tobacco’s pockets to recoup healthcare, morbidity/mortality costs that could no longer be fully taken care of by someone else (themselves, insurers or government).

    Morgan Spurlock tried to make the same case in ‘Super Size Me’. That fast food is purposely addictive. Those hurt by such an addition are not responsible ergo Medicare/Medicaid should go after those industries. Juries evidently haven’t bought it either is my guess.

    Then, there is the ‘big’ picture of morbidity/mortality as a cost of modern life. I’ve already run some interesting stats for my area regarding intentional violence (of all kinds, not just guns) vs. random constant background violence done by negligence or various forms of accident involving that other modern weapon, vehicles. It’s the obvious comparison often made.

    But aside from knives and inflicted physical trauma being at least half of violent crime of intent (or other factors, and which have their own patterns of circumstances, e.g. child abuse/homicide), it was interesting to me how many intentional and negligent acts of
    violence were committed using a vehicle. Enough to push gun violence into the minority of overall afflictions.

    I certainly don’t see this broken out on violence stats. I doubt no matter how much money is given the CDC or any other institution, that the esteemed PhD’s being funded to do studies on violence do, or have done, either. Especially the number of people killed or injured by vehicles intentionally, or by those in vehicles fleeing police or a crime scene.

    There are also a significant number of drivers later charged with homicide or other crimes after hitting a pedestrian, killing/injuring a passenger in their vehicle in a crash, or occupants of other vehicles (while driving in a criminal or negligent manner). This last stat is very hard to follow up on no matter how many data bases you mash together or proficiency in ‘data science’ or mining. Knowing a few PhD’s (and M.D.s) who were certainly no data scientists in their fields, I have seen no sign or details of studies that lead me to believe it’s being done in the area of social ‘science’ studies either.

    It often takes months for charges to be brought and trials concluded in such cases. Even if acquitted, there is still the fact a driver did cause the death/injury of others by bad judgement, distraction or other failure. Unless a ‘study’ specifically mentions having done this time consuming chore, I can only assume it hasn’t been done.

    And this is only one parallel area of our lives where costly social cause and effect are murky or relegated to political arm waving. Just read the stats this week on over doses (and we know how some of those cases got started) . Anyone else feel perhaps it’s a de facto form of euthanasia? If not for people, perhaps the issue of burying who or what’s the responsible cause.

    • You raise a lot of good points, but the government’s smoking “issue” was BS. James I wrote about the unhealthiness of smoking in the 17th century; every ciggy is a fresh, choking reminder of its own toxicity, and everyone who claims to have been misled / not known is completely full of it.

      I’ve known so many smoking-related deaths (family, in-laws, family of friends), and the story is almost always the same: a person is healthy until around the end of his working days, gets sick, and dies after a relatively small number of doctor visits / hospital stays. Unsurprisingly, people whose hobby is inhaling pollutants generally aren’t obsessive about early screening and preventive care.

      The people I knew paid their own way / had their own insurance, but even those whose treatment cost the government tens or low hundreds of thousands saved Socialist Security the millions it would have paid them to sit in their own feces watching “Murder, She Wrote” for the next 2-5 decades. It isn’t “nice” to notice that, but “nice” isn’t a mandate for coercion when actual math tends in the opposite direction.

      • “…but even those whose treatment cost the government tens or low hundreds of thousands saved Socialist Security the millions…”

        SOMEBODY ARREST THIS GUY !! He just revealed the secret motive about why the Soc Sec Admin publishes all those ads about waiting until 72, or later, before drawing Soc Sec benefits; government is hoping you will die before that.

        Well, while we are revealing government secrets……there is no Soc Sec lockbox. If you could see a Soc Sec check, the issuer is the Treasury Department, not Soc Sec. My Air Force retirement check doesn’t come from the Air Force, nor Department of Defense.

        What does that mean? Elected representatives to the national government don’t want you to know that your Soc Sec check is simply a form of welfare that you are only eligible for if you continue to breathe.

        • Thank you, kind sir! (Well, ah, not for the “arrest”)

          Uncoincidentally, I’m sure, you picked the age (72) around which most people who started collecting as early as possible will exhaust their contributions and transition to pure welfare. “What? You mean after I put $50/mo into a non-interest-bearing .gov piggy bank in the 50s, collecting $2800/mo for as many decades as I worked isn’t ‘just getting my own money back’!”

  23. The GAO has always had trouble with math. They are supposed to “score” the cost of proposed bills. They always come in far under the true cost of the damage the new proposed laws do so the politicians have cover.
    I would trust them if they said 1+1=2.
    The General Accounting Office have no credibility.

    • “The GAO has always had trouble with math. They are supposed to “score” the cost of proposed bills.”

      Understandable mistake. The CBO is charged with “scoring” legislation.

  24. There is absolutely nothing wrong with spending money to address root causes of violence like systemic poverty, a corrupt justice system, and to increase mental health programs out there.

    The issue becomes when the money gets diverted for gun control.

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