Gun sales spiked after Sandy Hook. So did people being shot and killed.

Gun sales in the United States spiked dramatically after a shooter walked into Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 and killed 26 people, 20 of whom were children. Now researchers say that as a result of that rush in gun purchases, 60 additional Americans — 20 of whom were children — were killed by accidental gunshots.

Five months after the tragedy, three million guns — that’s three million more than the normal rate of gun buying in the U.S. — left stores and entered people’s homes (or wherever they chose to keep them). In a study published Thursday in the journal Science, researchers show that the spike in accidental gun fatalities was almost certainly caused by this simultaneous increase in the number of guns generally around, and apparently not locked up.  Read more…

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