* 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.
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.
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.
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
> For suicides, white children accounted for 78 percent of the deaths.
I see a lot of attention nationally about the other alarming stats in this article, but almost never hear anything about the astronomical suicide rate among white children. It may be time to have a national conversation about how and why we're teaching these kids to hate themselves in such large numbers.
Because they're aware they're being scapegoated under the intersectional model.
Non-white = you get special treatment and attention.
Non-straight = you get special treatment and attention.
Non-male = you get special treatment and attention.
And they're being taught they deserve this.
And as their demographics collapse they lose any chance of reversing the trend non-violently.
It's astonishingly clear and predictable.
The question is, will they die a slow erosion death or make a last-ditch play?
Both options are bad.
By far the easiest win would be to enforce laws more strictly against people who have proven themselves to be violent.
Many homicides are committed by people who already have a violent past or other very troubling crimes. Putting them in jail, and preventing them from purchasing guns for at least some time after release, would dramatically bring down homicide numbers.
And once they are a prohibited person, if you find them with a gun put them in jail again.
No constitutional challenges and no new laws even need to be passed. Just police and DAs doing their jobs.
Unfortunately in a lot of cities the clearance rate on murders is pathetic. In Chicago it's about 50%, and it's only that high because so many suspects are found dead.
I mean we've tried nearly nothing and it hasn't worked. Seriously though, you need to approach it from a statistical perspective, looking at FBI crime stats, the highest numbers of homicides are from handguns [0]. Yeah there is "firearm, type not stated" that is large but assume the same distribution of the ones stated for the purposes of discussion.
What goes counter to that is all the media and political coverage about rifles and mass shootings with them. They are scary and its frightening to think about those happening. However, if you don't talk about handguns you're not going to make a dent in those overall numbers.
Your first sentence is regrettable in an otherwise informative post.
There are tons of laws, and part of the problem is that many laws are just, well, stupid and poorly-implemented.
California has some kind of review process for guns themselves, in order to go on the "Roster" from which normal people can buy them. This is a highly restricted list that excludes most new models even if they are functionally the same. It serves no useful purpose and does nothing to reduce the danger of guns in any way, it's just to interfere with lawful gun owners who want more modern models, and cause trouble for manufacturers who need to keep producing old ones.
If you were a gun owner, you'd probably think that they really are out to get you, and you may question whether those who passed the law even care about bringing firearm deaths down. That makes it a lot harder to work on legislation that's actually useful.
And laws that are actually useful, like those that put violent people in jail (and put them back again if they are caught with a gun after they get out) have been tried and they do work. But a lot of cities are not enforcing those laws consistently.
Could more be done? Yes, I think so. But compromise is a two-way street where both sides are trying to create a better balance. As long as "compromise" always means a one-way ratchet of gun restrictions, the other side will resist it with whatever they have.
At this point I honestly don't see any meaningful legislation being passed until gun violence literally breaches the halls of power. If school shootings didn't do it, what else is there?
(I hate that I have this view, because it's a reflection of such an ugly and stupid state of affairs)
Removing guns, at least temporarily, from homes where someone is actively suicidal or in mental health crisis would be a good start. Locking guns up appropriately away from the ammunition would be another good step. Removing guns from homes where there is domestic abuse and domestic violence would go a long way as well.
Should we be even spending our resources here? 2279 firearm homicides for this group. Diabetes seems like a better place to spend our energy and resources.
283,000 children and adolescents younger than age 20 years—or 35 per 10,000 US youths—had diagnosed diabetes. This includes 244,000 with type 1 diabetes.
Having access to a gun increases your chance of successfully completing suicide by almost an order of magnitude. This may not be exact numbers, but to first order, attempting suicide with methods other than guns have about a 10% success rate. Attempting suicide with a gun has a success rate closer to 90%.
We can council and support survivors of suicide attempts. We cannot bring a corpse back.
Information is hidden when we generalize too much.
How many are innocent children (or teens) vs crime-or-drug-involved teens? Note: this is not to say deaths of criminals is somehow OK, just that any policy prescription would be very different.
Similarly, mixing homicide and suicide obscures meaningful policy discussion.
tl;dr = I think we should all be skeptical of any gun-related data in the US.
I don't doubt the narrative in the article, but I'm skeptical about the data used. For years, my impression has been that gun advocates in the US have done everything they can to prevent any sort of data collection and/or analysis wrt to anything related to guns (ownership, usage, and gun-related deaths). I think this is based on the fear that the data will be used to take everyone's guns (either the FBI will start kicking down doors and seizing guns, or law makers will use the data to help pass gun restrictions). Furthermore, I don't know much about the CDC's "WONDER" database, but I can see where a gun-related death could be reported simply as an "accidental death" or something like that in certain counties, and as such, that wouldn't show up as gun-related in the "WONDER" data.
It isn't a fear, it's reality. This past winter, the ATF issued a regulation—without any action by Congress—that retroactively turned millions of Americans into felons unless they gave up or destroyed their firearms or applied for a special permit and consented to being tracked by the government. Challenges are working their way through the courts (and so far not friendly to the ATF), but that takes time, and in any case, doesn't change the fact that they are trying to take Americans' guns.
You should very much doubt the narrative in the article. Violent crime in the United States is very much trending downward. Even the crazy riots of 2020, while an uptick from 2019, were nothing compared to 1991.
https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/09/gun-deaths-among-us-c...