> This is almost universally due to gang activity and not the kids picking up weapons from friends and family and shooting themselves or others.
This doesn't seem to be accurate. Research [1] looking at data from a few years back (before firearms became the leading cause of death for children in the US) found:
Firearm deaths in children were 53% homicide, 38% suicide, 6% unintentional.
Of homicides in older children (13-17) the leading circumstances were argument (40%), precipitated by another crime (31%), and gang related (21%.)
> Depending on how finely you split the other causes, anything could be the "leading cause of death".
In my country there are usually zero gun deaths among children (0-17) (usually here means that they do exist, but are so rare that I think the last one was in 2009)
No matter how you fine tune your stats, gun deaths will never be a leading cause for them, while In 2017, nine children and teens were killed with guns each day in America — one every 2 hours and 34 minutes ...
> "For example, the large majority of firearms deaths fall into one of two categories. The first is gang violence..."
that's incorrect. accidental shootings and suicide are major categories, while intentional homicides, of which "gang violence" is a subset, is pretty low on the list.
Note that not all of those gang-related homicides involved guns. Note also that the methodology to describe a homicide as "gang-related" will tend to overestimate the rate of gang crime, since the most common methodology is to check whether anyone involved is a gang member even if the motive was not gang-related. See FAQ #5 here: https://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/About/FAQ#q5
I haven't done more than five minutes of reading, but the numbers I listed would have to be way off to make the majority of gun violence gang-related.
> Some 6,464 deaths involved children between 5 to 14 years of age, amounting to 340 deaths annually on average. A further 32,478 children between 15 to 18 years old died, or 2,050 per year on average between 1999 and 2017.
> Of these children, 61 percent were killed in an assault involving a firearm, while 32 percent died by suicide. A further 5 percent died in an accident. The death was undetermined in 2 percent of cases.
It seems misleading to me to include suicide counts in a headline that says “shot dead”.
Removing suicides, this comes out to 1625 per year. Approximately 900,000 people in total die in the US per year.
What they are describing as an epidemic is in reality 340 deaths per year of under-14s.
For reference, approximately 450 people per year die of acetaminophen (tylenol) poisoning in the US.
The leading cause of death among young people is not guns. It's not even firearm-related injury, which is what your link talks about. The thing at the link (it's not a study) you point to has gotten a lot of press. It is deliberately deceptive.
It uses an age range of 1-19, excluding children 0-1 years old and including adults who are in their 18th and 19th years. So sure, when you do this bullshit maybe you can produce the answer your audience wants to see / which will play well in the press / which will lead to clicks. But it's not honest. The honest statistic for the U.S. is 0-18(exclusive) years old, and when you do the honest thing you see that death by firearm-related injury is not the leading cause of death for minors in the U.S.
The deliberately deceptive statistic is driven by including as many 15-35 year old males as possible. This is the age range when males in gangs are extra killy.
Note that the vast majority of child gun deaths are not from mass shootings. One third are intentional suicides. Most of the rest is kids accidentally shooting themselves or each other with guns that they gain access to.
(While we're at it, and in the vein of the article, gun-owning parents tend to drastically overestimate how well-behaved their kids are around guns, and thus allow them more access than is safe.)
> We estimate that there were 110 unintentional firearm deaths to children 0–14 annually in the U.S. during this 8 year time period, 80 % higher than reported by the Vital Statistics. The victims were predominantly male (81 %). Approximately two thirds of the shootings were other-inflicted, and
I like how it's an argument that mocks gun regulations with the fact that more kids kill themselves with guns than they do each other.
Firearm related injuries are the #2 killer of children after automotive accidents[1]. The rate of firearm related deaths for young people went up nearly 14% between 2019 and 2020 alone.
I do agree with the importance of socio-economic solutions, though, even before gun regulations.
> In fact, children under 15 are about 40 times more likely to die by swimming pool than by an accidental firearms discharge [0].
You know, it's not really the accidental discharges I'm worried about. It's the mass shootings.
Also, you appear to be misquoting that article. The 40x number is scaled by the number of pools/firearms, and so is saying "an individual firearm is less likely to kill a child than an individual pool" (although firearms are vastly more common than pools).
And, finally, that article uses "86 children killed by accidental firearm discharge in 2000" as its primary metric. The top google hit [0] for "How many children are killed each year by guns?" gives a value of 1,500.
Approximately 35% of the gun deaths are black male youth being shot — which indicates the statistic is likely skewed heavily by gang violence. (Using their numbers: 86% of 41%.)
It seems disingenuous to portray this as an epidemic of “school children” being shot, when the reality is we’re witnessing the effects of gangs fighting, utilizing their child soldiers — and more broadly, a cultural failure in American inner cities.
I can’t seem to find their data, but I’d wager 50% of those deaths are gang related, and from a handful of metro areas.
We don’t have a gun problem: we have an urban culture problem.
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.
> And they are concentrated in certain types of places (e.g., poor urban ghetto) such that the parts of the country that aren't these places have vanishingly small probabilities of being hurt by a shooting.
I said "many places" not "all places". Indeed, shootings are concentrated to a few areas with high crime rates. Doesn't mean that people living in those areas don't have to watch out. I replied to an anecdote about people living close to such a tavern having to watch out.
As for gun murders being a rare death cause, indeed if you average over all age ranges they are. However, for younger people they are a major concern. CDC data [0] lists homicides in the top 4 reasons for death for age groups from 1 until 35. Which weapons are used for these homicides? A different statistic tells us most times it's guns [1].
And yes, focusing on falls, car accidents and diabetes would be awesome. But preventing gun deaths is important too.
* 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.
> I said "many places" not "all places"... Doesn't mean that people living in those areas don't have to watch out.
I agree that there is some non-zero number of people in the U.S. who have to watch out for gun murder. The point I'm trying to make is that they make up a really small proportion of the population. Anecdotes are fun.
> As for gun murders being a rare death cause, indeed if you average over all age ranges they are. However, for younger people they are a major concern. CDC data [0] lists homicides in the top 4 reasons for death for age groups from 1 until 35. Which weapons are used for these homicides? A different statistic tells us most times it's guns [1].
You're right that, among untimely deaths, gun murders move up the ranking if you're looking at young people. But this misses the main thing, which is that untimely deaths of any kind are super rare among young people, even rarer than overall. Why should we care if gun murders make up 50% of untimely deaths among young people if the likelihood of untimely death is sufficiently low? Your line of reasoning seems to indicate a 10% chance of untimely death with 1 percentage point of that being gun murder is preferable to a 1% chance of untimely death with 0.5 percentage points of that being gun murder.
As an aside, thinking about this (and many other things) in terms of ordinal rankings will often lead you down the wrong path. "Top four reasons" tells us nothing at all. If there are 5,000 categories constructed and they are roughly evenly distributed, "top four" tells us nothing. If 99% of the probability mass is in #1, "top four" tells us nothing. It's like the classic "The U.S. is [embarassingly] #44 in math achievement". This means nothing if the top 80 countries are tightly clustered around 98 math achievement points.
> But preventing gun deaths is important too.
My point is that it isn't important. There are much, much bigger fish to fry from a public health perspective. The marginal benefit of throwing one dollar at "gun violence" is << the marginal benefit of throwing that same buck at something like trying to get construction workers to wear proper safety harnesses.
This doesn't seem to be accurate. Research [1] looking at data from a few years back (before firearms became the leading cause of death for children in the US) found:
Firearm deaths in children were 53% homicide, 38% suicide, 6% unintentional.
Of homicides in older children (13-17) the leading circumstances were argument (40%), precipitated by another crime (31%), and gang related (21%.)
[1] https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/140/1/e20163...
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