More than 4,000 Florida children aged 17 and under were hospitalized for firearm injuries between 2018 and 2024, about 1.5 per day, and the burden falls overwhelmingly on a small number of residential ZIP codes concentrated in four metro areas.
The finding comes from hospital billing data obtained from the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration and analyzed by KFF Health News and The Trace with two local newsrooms, Action News Jax in Jacksonville and WFTV in Orlando. Nearly all of the highest-burden ZIP codes sit in Jacksonville, Orlando, Miami, or Tampa Bay, and nearly all of them have large Black or Latino populations.