For decades, gun control advocates and their allies in “public health” have pushed a misleading factoid about children and firearms.
This is how it works: Step one, acquire statistics on firearm-related deaths among children ages 0 to 14. Step two, combine that relatively low number with the far greater number of firearm-related deaths involving juveniles and young adults ages 15 to 17, 15 to 19, or even ages 15 to 24. Step three, present the resulting data as the shocking number of “children” (ages 0 to 17, 0 to 19 or 0 to 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 by claiming “gun violence is the leading cause of death of children.”
Consider the data on those who may be properly defined as children – ages 0-14. For this cohort, firearm-related injuries are not the leading causes of death and are not higher than motor vehicle deaths. The number of motor vehicle deaths in this age group was more than 40-percent higher than firearm-related deaths in 2023.
This does shift when examining the cohorts ages 15 to 17, 15 to 19, or 15 to 24. Roughly 70 percent of the firearm-related deaths that occur in the 0 to 17 age group happened among the juveniles ages 15-17 in 2023. This disparity shouldn’t be surprising. The 15 to 17 cohort is far more often engaged in the type of street crime that can give rise to firearm-related violence and that many jurisdictions have decided to address in a more lenient manner in recent years. The conflation of this age group with young children is even more absurd when one considers that, in the vast majority of jurisdictions, those aged 15 and older can be prosecuted as adults.
Recently, an intrepid journalist figured out this gun control industry tactic for himself.
On June 11, the Kansas City Star published the piece “I tried to solve the great gun mystery at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. It didn’t go well,” by David Mastio. Readers are encouraged to enjoy the item in its entirety.
The piece chronicles Mastio’s attempt to get a straight answer from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (named for billionaire gun control financier Michael Bloomberg) as to whether firearms are in fact the leading cause of death for children. The author explained:
While the school’s report, Gun Violence in the United States 2022, says over and over again that guns are the leading killer of children and teens age 1-17, it never says what the leading killer of children not including teens is.
The Bloomberg School of Public Health report itself defined “children” as ages 1-9 and “teens” as 10-17.
According to the item, Mastio’s pursuit was prompted by “the Ad Council… launching a multimillion-dollar, multiyear public service campaign telling parents that their kids are in danger because guns are the number one killer of children(!) and teens” and that the Ad Council website “cites the Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Gun Violence Solutions over and over.”
After failing to receive an answer to his simple question from the Bloomberg school’s gun violence researchers via email, Mastio went to the Johns Hopkins campus in Baltimore for help. He was escorted out by security.
Mastio eventually received an answer to his question when he contacted the school’s Center on Injury Research and Policy (which does not focus narrowly on gun policy). The author explained:
Surely there is somebody else at the Bloomberg School who knows what kills kids ages 1-9. Sure enough, there was another research group, The Center on Injury Research and Policy. I emailed them, and in a matter of hours, they gave me the answer.
I’ll give you one guess what that is. You’re right – not guns. Not even close. Mishaps with things other than guns, such as drownings, falls and car accidents, are the big killers.
Alternately, on June 9, the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics published a strange article giving the impression that the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision McDonald v. Chicago has something to do with firearm-related pediatric mortality. As is to be expected in this kind of “research,” the very first sentence of the study repeated the tired factoid “firearm deaths are now the leading cause of death among US children and adolescents.”
The researchers posited that the McDonald decision shifted the legal landscape around guns in the U.S., and therefore they sought “[t]o measure excess mortality due to firearms among US children aged 0 to 17 years after the McDonald v Chicago US Supreme Court decision (2010).”
Specifically, the researchers examined 2011 through 2023 and tried to lump states into broad categories based on the supposed “permissiveness” of their gun laws. Unsurprisingly, the academics attribute worse outcomes to more permissive states based on their lack of gun control.
That choice of start date might strike gun owners as odd. As a scholarly matter, the McDonald decision was consequential in that it made clear that state and local governments, along with the federal government (District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008), are bound by the Second Amendment. As a practical matter, the effects of the decision were muted.
The decision struck down Chicago’s and a couple of nearby suburban jurisdictions’ total bans on handguns. However, federal judges largely found dubious ways to confine the decision to its specific facts rather than meaningfully grapple with the Second Amendment as a Constitutional right.
The lower federal courts’ intransigence prompted several Supreme Court justices to issue scathing dissents from denial of certiorari in Second Amendment cases and culminated in the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022) decision, which rebuked the lower courts’ prevailing means of interpreting (undermining?) the Second Amendment.
Following the McDonald decision, governments mostly continued to do what they were doing before. Pro-Second Amendment jurisdictions made things better for law-abiding gun owners, while anti-gun jurisdictions piled on ever more infringements…short of outright handgun bans.
This is to say that using the McDonald decision as a starting point for any type of data analysis is bizarre and arbitrary. When dealing with social science, strange beginning and end dates for data should raise the utmost suspicion.
Of course, over the period the study examined (2011-2023) there was serious social upheaval that had nothing to do with firearm laws. That deserves examination. Only the most obtuse observer would refuse to acknowledge that over the relevant period there was a severe and wide-ranging attack on law enforcement and the broader ability to administer effective criminal justice. From 2014 to George Floyd riot-filled 2020, the murder rate went up 50-percent.
As previously noted, juveniles ages 15 to 17 account for the overwhelming majority of firearm-related mortality among youth. That’s because the 15 to 17 cohort is far more often engaged in the type of street crime that can give rise to firearm-related violence and that many jurisdictions decided to address in a more lenient manner starting in the late 2010s.
There are a few hints to this in the study, but the issue is largely unacknowledged.
For instance, the authors note that the increase in under 18 firearm mortality was “more concentrated among homicides.” This suggests a problem more criminal justice in nature than purely a matter of firearm access (much less broad firearm policy).
The authors also included the following passage:
In the most permissive firearm laws state grouping, we found that increases in pediatric firearm mortality occurred in all urbanicity categories, with a notable increase in large central metropolitan urbanicity, in particular during the COVID-19 era.
Increased firearm deaths among non-Hispanic Black populations exacerbated known disparities. This may reflect disproportionate increases in firearm ownership during the study. Inconsistent physician adherence (by patient race and ethnicity) and the effectiveness of received anticipatory guidance—related to safe storage, for example—could be an explanation; while this is speculative, a similar phenomenon has been previously observed regarding car safety recommendations.
Therefore, as others have suggested, anticipatory guidance may be effective and should be studied.
Consider examining more recent changes in the overall murder rate from a different frame.
In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. The decision made clear that the Second Amendment protects the right to carry a firearm outside the home for self-defense and outlawed discretionary carry permitting regimes.
The latest available Department of Justice Crime in the U.S. Annual Report data tables show that from 2022 to 2023 the murder rate (per 100,000) fell from 6.6 to 5.7, a 12 percent decrease. According to the FBI, through the first half of 2024, murders were down another 22.7 percent from the same period in 2023. Though it is still early, there is some evidence to suggest that 2025 could have the lowest murder rate on record.
Should this welcome trend be attributed to the Bruen decision, the legal landscape it’s ushered in, and a renewed respect for carrying firearms outside the home? Somehow, we doubt the “scientific experts” in America’s “public health” sector will be quick to apply the same logic here as did the authors of the June 9 study in supposedly examining McDonald’s impact.
Pritzker Melts Down Over Trump Administration’s Objection to Illinois Semi-Auto Ban.
https://bearingarms.com/camedwards/2025/06/17/pritzker-semi-auto-ban-n1228960
Anti-gun have always used word and semantics and number and statistic and ‘research’ games to support their false narrative propaganda.
Although the anti-gun actions for what is their false narrative propaganda is rooted in the marxist socialist concept of control-propaganda, the current, modern day, version concept of it began with Josh Sugarman.
Josh Sugarman was the anti-gun guy who made up the concept of the terms ‘assault rifle’ and ‘assault weapon’ being applied to the semi-auto MSR (i.e. civilian semi-auto AR-15). He did it as a means to dupe the public into thinking a civilian semi-auto rifle was a ‘military machine gun’ that was created for ‘military use on the battlefield’. Even Sugarman admitted his application was false in that he even said in his own words he created that association as a means to dupe the public.
But if we go deeper we find a few things, among them is that the AR-15 was not originally created as a ‘military rifle’, but rather the original design was intended to be a civilian semi-auto sporting rifle with ‘military style cosmetics’ intended to appeal to a growing ‘nich’ market of gun owners who wanted such a rifle. It was not until a little later that the design was granted the Armalite design designation ‘AR-15’. If we research further we find that the AR-15 was never really a military rifle at all as it was never, and has never been in use as, a issued U.S. military rifle contrary to what the anti-gun claim – it actually began life as a civilian only rifle design, it was designed ‘AR-15’ (the 15th rifle design in the ARmalite design cycle of rifles in general), changes were made to the design in an attempt to provide a military model of the original civilian design to attract the military market but this attempt by Armalite failed to capture the military market. Now enters Colt, who buys the patent for the ‘AR-15’, they do some re-design producing what is in effect a ‘different’ design that’s focused on the military market that Colt wanted to capture and it worked, and then the Colt re-design of the Armalite patent was designated the ‘M-16’.
I bring this up to show one of the little word and semantics games the anti-gun play. Contrary to what the anti-gun say, the civilian semi-auto AR-15 was never originally created as a ‘weapon of war’ or ‘assault weapon’ for the U.S. military. It was originally created as a civil only semi-auto rifle and never entered U.S. military service. Josh Sugarman knew this, he even used old Armalite documents (from the original company and designers, not the same as today’s Armalite which is owned now by a different company who purchased the name and DBA Armalite) in his research that showed this to be true and stated as such in some of his older writings and musings under different ‘pseudonyms’ he frequently used to spew anti-gun rethoric in writings, and sources on line have verified the true origin of the AR-15 as a civilian only rifle to be true. Unfortunately, in the gun community the first they really heard of the rifle was as the ‘AR-15’ when Eugene Stoner adapted the original civilian only design to attempt to capture the military market when it was then designated ‘AR-15’ so he is credited with ‘creation’ of the AR-15 even though he didn’t actually ‘originally create’ it but rather adapted the original civilian only design that had not been given a design designation because it was not going to be marketed because Eugene Stoner came along and convinced Armalite to focus on the military market (this decision is what eventually caused the original Armalite to fail and force the sell of patents to Colt).
But, Josh Sugarman was also a fan of Paul Joseph Goebbels, yes that Goebbels – the chief propagandist for the Nazi Party and then Reich Minister of Propaganda from 1933 to 1945, one of Hitlers buddies. Sugarman had studied and adopted the techniques and methods of Goebbels for how words and semantics and numbers could be used to fool people into believing a false narrative to gain control of a population and enrich the ‘ruling class’. Sugarman began to push these techniques into the anti-gun efforts and line it up for anti-gun ‘researchers’. And today’s modern incarnation of gun-control narrative, as a result Sugarmans efforts, is one of the biggest frauds perpetrated on the American public.
Correction for: “… it was designed ‘AR-15’ (the 15th rifle design in the ARmalite design cycle of rifles in general)…”
should have been …
… it was designated ‘AR-15’ (the 15th rifle design in the ARmalite design cycle of rifles in general)…
How many people actually look at source documents vs. listening to the news people/influencers/politicians talk?
A lot of people never look at the source documents, never do research into the subject – these tend to take at face value things said by ‘doctors’ and ‘scientists’ and ‘researchers’ and ‘people with titles at organizations’ etc… and maybe sometimes you get people who are a little more curious who do a kind of lite-research but usually nothing in depth.
Then there are the complete morons in the left wing who jump on anything the left wing media prints believing it to be ‘gospel’ and you can even see when that happens, for example, left wing media says ‘Guns the number one killer of children’ and it becomes an actual ‘citation’ for them when the left wing media source was propagating a lie. Miner49er (in another comment section) just did this with a story published by the Guardian, the claims the Guardian made (that Miner49 posted in his TDS meltdown) were false and it took all of a minute of research to find out they were false – but Miner49er, like most left wingers, doesn’t really know what ‘research’ and ‘context’ is so they make up for it by having the left wing media feed their confirmation bias and it becomes ‘gospel’ to them and to argue it they use a lot of ‘out of context’ stuff because its what fed their confirmation bias then they claim “but I posted a citation’ like that someway makes it true or correct when their argument wasn’t true to begin with because they took it all out of context.
correction for: “…because they took it all out of context.”
should have been …
because they took it all out of context and didn’t bother to research it.
anyway, that’s the reason I stopped posting citations for what I write sometimes. Its not because there are no true factual citations available that I can post – its because I got tired of doing the research for people. I used to post citations over at TTAG for dacian, but then I realized it didn’t matter how many factual true citations I posted he was still going to ignore them and continue to argue in the face of actual truth and fact because they did not fit his confirmation bias. Its the same with Miner49er, he challenges for citations but I don’t post them and instead tell him to do his own research and I even drop little hints for him sometimes to help him do his research – its not that I can’t post citations, its that I’m not going to do his research for him because I know he is still going to argue and TDS because he needs to feed that mental illness confirmation bias.
I’d like to see a bar graph of firearm deaths by actual age, not age group.