Orange County health officials track and publicize almost all manner of death, counting up the number of people who perish every year of everything from heart disease and cancer to COVID-19 and Alzheimer’s.
A big exception is guns.
While most public health departments in Southern California treat firearm injuries like other causes of death – tabulating the numbers and telling the public how many people in their community die as a result of gunshots, intentional or otherwise – such data has not been listed on public websites run by the Orange County Health Care Agency since the middle of the last decade.
Even over the past three years, as gun purchases and gun homicide and suicide rates have spiked nationally, and at least three mass shootings have taken place in Orange County, the local health department has released no data that researchers or the general public might use to compare local gun death rates to the rest of the country.
The one mention of “firearms” on county public health websites is as a cause of suicide, and even in that case guns are listed only as part of a combined category, “firearms and explosives.” That makes it impossible to track the exact number of people, locally, who choose to use a gun to end their life.
Current and former county officials insist that’s not intentional. They say there is no overt effort to hide or obscure public data about firearm deaths because such numbers might be politically sensitive.
“In my experience, none of the supervisors or anybody ever told me you’re not to report on (gun deaths),” said Dr. Clayton Chau, who led the Orange County Health Care Agency during most of the pandemic before stepping down earlier this year to take a job in the private sector.
“But, yes, it’s true that the public numbers on (gun deaths) aren’t easily available.”
Lack of local public data doesn’t mean the information doesn’t exist. State and federal health experts track gun deaths in every…
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