Anti-gun Press Parrots Misleading
Stats and Creates Outright Falsehoods

As NRA-ILA recently pointed out, 'gun control' researchers and their establishment press lapdogs propagate misleading “science” to advance their political agenda. Sometimes this involves sophisticated statistical modeling, other times it involves the crude mischaracterization of data. The anti-gun advocates’ longest-running version of the latter involves conflating firearm-related deaths among children and those among juveniles and young adults.

This is how it works: Step one, acquire statistics on firearm-related deaths among children ages 1-14. Step two, combine that relatively low number with the far greater number of firearm-related deaths involving juveniles and young adults ages 15-19, or even ages 15-24. Step three, present the resulting data as the shocking number of “children” (ages 1-19 or 1-24) who are subjected to “gun violence” each day/week/month/year. Step four, use the disingenuous statistic to advocate for pre-determined 'gun control' policies.

Upon the release of the CDC’s 2020 fatal injury data, gun controllers dredged up this tactic once again. As with overall violent crime, firearm-related violence increased in 2020 alongside the conscious implementation of soft-on-crime criminal justice policies. Sadly, younger people were no exception to this increase.

However, anti-gun researchers and the media abused the CDC’s data to create misleading headlines that blared “Guns were leading cause of death among children, teens in 2020, research says,” “Guns Became the Leading Cause of Death for American Children and Teens in 2020,” and “Firearms surpass motor vehicles as leading cause of death among kids, UM researchers say.”

When examining injuries to actual children or kids, ages 1-14, firearm-related injuries are not the leading causes of death and are not higher than motor vehicle deaths. [...] .....