How often does UNMH treat shooting victims?

Editor’s note: this is part one of a three-part series looking at gun violence data from the University of New Mexico Hospital. Part two can be found here and part three can be found here.

When he’s working in the trauma department at the University of New Mexico Hospital, Dr. Richard Miskimins talks to parents who have just lost a child to gun violence about once a week. He has seen bodies split open from neck to pelvis and people lose their arms or their legs or “have permanent ostomies and bags.” 

“You don’t realize that it’s happening multiple times a day on average and most people in the city and in the state are fairly insulated from that,” said Miskimins, a trauma surgeon. “No one thinks that it happens that often.” 

In order to get a sense of the toll of gun violence from around the state, City Desk ABQ combed through three years’ worth of data on the people UNMH treated. The data was obtained by attorney Thomas Grover.

The majority of the 1,715 patients treated from the beginning of 2020 through January 2023 were shot close enough to Albuquerque that they were brought from the scene, but almost 200 were transferred from other hospitals. The hospital has the only Level 1 trauma center in the state — meaning those needing the most intensive care are treated there.

Miskimins estimates UNMH sees about half of the people who were shot but did not die on scene from around the state. Some of those injuries were minor — a grazed finger or thigh, for example — while 143 were deadly. 

Data on how many people are killed by guns each year is easy to compile and typically very accurate, Miskimins said, but data on firearm injuries gleaned from hospital medical records has a lot more opportunity for error. For instance, in this data set if someone was brought to UNMH more than once they would show up as a new patient each time. In statewide databases, patients can get counted twice if they are transferred from one hospital to another. 

“The data is not perfect but the data is accurate in the trends,” Miskimins said. “The data is accurate in what happens, and it’s useful data, even though it’s not perfect data. It’s useful data to help decrease firearm injury deaths.”

Miskimins said when crafting policies to address gun violence, it’s important to think of it in terms of harm reduction. 

“The science and the data says wait periods save people’s lives, safe storage prevents a 14-year-old girl that’s distraught from shooting themselves in the head,” he said. “Are we going to have zero? I don’t think so, we don’t have zero traffic deaths. But we’ve done things to fix traffic laws, safety crumple zones, other things. And I think we do the same thing with guns.” 

Below is a timeline showing every gunshot wound treated by UNMH from Jan. 1, 2020, through Jan. 30, 2023. Use the scroll bar at the bottom to explore the data and zoom in and out, and the filter in the upper right to display which patients died at the hospital.