Gun deaths for "Children or Adolescents"
being the leading cause of death
UPDATED: Thoughts on the New
England Journal of Medicine Letter

Click to enlarge image

This is a significant update to an original (published 4/23/22) and dealing with misleading claims - one of the favored ways that anti-gun groups like to disseminate statistics in order to further their mission.

UPDATE: The New England Journal of Medicine has a letter making the claim that children are more likely to die from guns than any other cause. The piece contains many misleading or false claims. Their measure of deaths from guns primarily involves homicides from the the CDC, which produces a much larger number than the FBI UCR data. For example, in 2020, there were 1,623 homicides for those under 20 years of age according to the FBI Uniform Crime Report and 2,811 according to the CDC.

If you look at just those under 18, what most would classify as children and adolescents, the total number of deaths for the FBI UCR is 963 and the CDC number is 1,376.

Their comparison with traffic accidents involving cars ignores other motor vehicle acccidents as well as cars hitting pedestrians or bicycles.

Their measure of defining children for everyone 19 and under is crucial because there is a lot of gang violence for 17, 18, and 19 year olds. The notion that banning guns is going to stop this drug gang violence is simply not serious. You are going to as successful in stopping gangs from getting guns as you are from stopping them from getting illegal drugs to sell.

Defining children is as including people who are 18 and 19 has been a common approach by gun control advocates. It is common that 75 to 80 percent of firearm injuries for those under 20 involve 17, 18, and 19 year olds.

Among the other false statements in the letter, is the claim that "firearm violence has increased during the Covid-19 pandemic," at least in the data through 2020. Actually, between 2019 and 2020, gun crimes reported to police actually fell by 27% (Table 8). The National Crime Victimization Survey also finds a similar 27% drop.
(Original Related Post (January 2017) follows:) [...] .....