* Their definition of "children" includes 19 year olds
If adjust your window to include everyone under the age of 18 and exclude everyone 18 and older, many of the points in the article are no longer true. A disproportionate amount of gun deaths are amongst young adults (not that surprising, since adults can buy guns and children typically can't)
Funnily enough, my state attorney general misread a similar article and started making claims yesterday about how gun deaths are the leading cause of deaths in 0-17 year olds, when AFAICT the data doesn't actually say that.
Yes, the absolute number is up. But the absolute number of most types of death are up, because the USA's population has doubled over the last 50 years.
If you look at per capita rates, gun deaths have gone up over the last couple years but are still way below the "all time high". We're still below gun deaths rates from the 1990s
They say right up front that 83% of deaths are ages 15-19. If you're looking at causation, it makes sense to look at 2-19 vs. 0-17, as the driving behavior of recklessness, etc doesn't change at 18.
Long story short, the younger and dumber you are, the more likely you are to die of an accidental gun death. And not shockingly, access to weapons drives mortality. Poorer and minority people in more permissive states have high mortality.
These stats are for victims, not perpetrators. You don't have to wield a gun to be killed by one (except for suicide)
>Long story short, the younger and dumber you are, the more likely you are to die of an accidental gun death
The age gap for accidental gun deaths isn't as dramatic as it is for intentional ones. The median age is like 35. That said, accidental gun deaths are a tiny slice (like 1% and declining) of overall gun deaths, so IMO it's more productive to focus on the much bigger slices of the pie. Just to make the rate more concrete, accidental gun deaths are ahead of deer but way behind things like drowning and choking.
It’s hard to know as certain interest groups prevent research.
Many of the tragic deaths beyond criminal activities perpetrated by minors center around young kids getting access to guns and accidentally discharging them.
Playing games with statistics doesn’t help anyone. If accidental deaths are declining in proportion, is that because of less incidents, or a larger divisor of total gun deaths?
Unlike with accidental gun deaths, we do things to help prevent deer accidents, drowning and choking.
It has to exclude babies to fit the political narrative, because infant deaths due to birth defects (3,963 per year or ~110 per 100,000) dwarf these numbers.
* Their definition of "children" excludes babies
* Their definition of "children" includes 19 year olds
If adjust your window to include everyone under the age of 18 and exclude everyone 18 and older, many of the points in the article are no longer true. A disproportionate amount of gun deaths are amongst young adults (not that surprising, since adults can buy guns and children typically can't)
Funnily enough, my state attorney general misread a similar article and started making claims yesterday about how gun deaths are the leading cause of deaths in 0-17 year olds, when AFAICT the data doesn't actually say that.
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