Youths who are injured in gun violence are more likely to need intensive care and are much more likely to die from their wounds than children injured by other means, US researchers said Tuesday. The findings, reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, offer a rare look at the impact of gun violence in America, where federally funded research on the matter has all but halted since the mid 1990s.

The Philippines' leading firearms lobby on Sunday said it backed a government campaign to clamp down on illegal guns following a spate of high-profile deaths this year. The Association of Firearms and Ammunitions Dealers (AFAD), citing police statistics, said the majority of gun-related violence was perpetrated using unlicensed weapons, rejecting calls for a total ban on firearms. "The biggest problem for legal and responsible firearm owners is when there is a knee-jerk reaction involving guns," association spokesman Alexander Reyes said.

Senators struck a hard-fought compromise Wednesday that could expand US background checks to all commercial firearms sales, which may result in the most ambitious change to gun laws since 1994. The deal comes four months after a massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, which left 20 young children and six adults dead and took America's epidemic of gun violence to an alarming new level.

Lawmakers in Connecticut state, where a gunman killed 20 children and six educators in one of the worst school shootings in U.S.