Every year, gunshot wounds prevent hundreds of West Virginians from leading long, healthy lives.
Around the same number of West Virginians die from gun wounds as from car crashes and fires combined. Guns were the third-leading cause of injury deaths in the state from 2016 to 2021, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But now, West Virginia has squandered a major opportunity to prevent more of these firearm deaths.
In 2020, West Virginia’s health department asked for federal money to address the problem. The CDC awarded the state $525,000 over three years to collect firearm injury data from emergency rooms and use that information to prevent and respond to future shootings.
The state health department collected this data but struggled to do much more than that. Last summer, Mountain State Spotlight found that despite coming up with a plan to connect older adults with lock boxes and new gun owners with firearm safety classes, the effort had stalled for nearly two years. Weeks before the end of the grant period, there was no public evidence that the state agency had made these plans a reality.
Now, as the grant period is over, much of the state’s awarded money is going away. A financial report from last December shows the health department is set to lose $454,000, or over 85%, of the $525,000 it was allocated but never used over the three year grant period.
A spokesperson for the CDC confirmed that the money will be returned to the U.S. Treasury.
In an email, West Virginia Department of Health spokesperson Annie Moore said that the state agency would use different funds to share health trend data with partners, although she wouldn’t say if the data will be used to prevent firearm injuries.
Moore would not say why the department did not spend the remaining $454,000 during the grant period.
Daniel Webster, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, said it’s disappointing to hear that West Virginia’s health department didn’t use most of the gun safety grant money.
“This is troubling news and speaks volumes about that state’s commitment to firearm injury prevention informed by data,” he wrote in an email.
‘A loss of an opportunity’
An estimated 58% of West Virginia households have guns, one of the highest rates in the country, according to the RAND Corporation. And the injury prevention plan that West Virginia came up with seemed to take that into account. Instead of restricting gun sales or limiting the places where people could carry firearms, it focused on promoting education for first-time owners and spreading information about safely storing guns.
The first strategy was to create a brochure intended for people who work with older adults. It would have had information about the best types of gun storage devices for people with dementia and when it was best for family members to remove guns from their houses.
Kayla Shaw, executive director of the senior center in Pocahontas County, thinks this type of brochure would help her nonprofit better keep the people they serve healthy.
“A lot of our seniors, they would rather have them in the open rather than in a gun safe or something of that nature,” Shaw said. “And half the time they’re shucked and loaded, ready to go.”
Citing the record number of Americans who bought guns for the first time during the pandemic, the plan also proposed providing firearm retailers with injury data that they could use to promote and improve their gun safety classes.
Both of these strategies aimed to protect West Virginians from self-inflicted or accidental shootings, which make up the majority of firearm deaths in the state. And they received praise from the CDC.
Marissa Zwald, a lead CDC scientist with the national project that funded West Virginia and nine other states’ efforts, said that she was impressed at the way the state had tailored its prevention plan efforts to the needs and wants of West Virginians.
“Some states have started to really think about their messaging,” she said last June.
But while the ideas garnered optimism, they appear to be shelved for the foreseeable future. In late July, the Alzheimer’s program director of West Virginia’s Bureau of Senior Services, a group that the plan said would work with, said she’d never heard of any proposed firearm injury prevention partnership between the bureau and the state health department.
Presently, there are no signs that the Department of Health is working to prevent West Virginians from firearm injuries. Recently, the CDC didn’t award the agency money as part of the next iteration of firearm protection grants, meant to build off the previous funding.
The agency’s Violence and Injury Prevention Program website does not list any strategies to prevent firearm injuries, and Moore didn’t answer a question about whether it’s currently taking action to decrease gun injuries; instead she highlighted that the Department of Health fulfilled the data collection required by the grant.
To Shaw, seeing the state return so much of the grant funding is frustrating. She knows there are some firearm safety strategies designed for young children, but she rarely sees anything done to help the elderly people she serves.
“I would say that’s a loss of an opportunity,” Shaw said. “I don’t see why they wouldn’t want to do something for older adults.”