Antigun activists have run with this messaging. It’s become a favored talking point among them and their political and media allies in recent years is that guns are the leading cause of death in children:
The above tweet from Giffords reveals two tactics employed to mislead Americans on this topic. The first is that they combine children and teens together. So while they want you to think of young children being harmed, they implicitly understand that the claim is only even arguably true if everyone under age 18 is included, not just the age range most people would consider a “child.”
Second, they love to conflate one set of statistics with another to manipulate their audience. Giffords started their tweet by referencing “gun violence” and end it by alluding to the horrors of school shootings. But school shootings, while horrific, are not a common way for children to die.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, there were a total of 131 people killed (including some adults) in active shooter incidents at elementary and secondary schools between 2000 and 2022. By way of comparison, 380 children under the age of 15 drowned in 2021 alone. Giffords is thus using the undeniable tragedy of school shootings to manipulate the reader into thinking a great number of children are dying in school shootings which is not the case.
Instead of misleading and dissembling, let’s zero in on what’s and what isn’t in this debate.
Defining Our Terms
As a lot of the obfuscation on this issue occurs via misleading definitions, we need to define our terms. I will consider anyone ages 0 to 12 to be a “child.” I will consider anyone ages 13 to 17 to be a “teenager.” Together, I will refer to everyone ages 0-17 collectively as “minors.”
Some may disagree with these definitions and consider anyone under age 18 to be a child. Others may even include 18 and 19 year old adults in this measure, as many studies have to inflate the gun-related deaths data by including legal adults.
Most people would agree, however, that the word “child” evokes the thought of a pre-teen minor, and not a teenager near adulthood. I think my definitions are thus reasonable and while not all may accept my framing, at least I’ve been upfront about how I define my terms (unlike so many on the other side of the issue).
Children are not frequently killed due to gun-related causes.
Among children ages 0-12, the CDC’s provisional data for 2023 tells us that a total of 385 were killed in all gun-related causes that year. This includes gun-related deaths of any kind, be they homicides, suicides, unintentional deaths, and the very few (if any) children who were killed in law enforcement shootings. That translates to a rate of 0.8 per 100,000 for this age group.
We already know that gun-related deaths can’t be the biggest killer of children, technically speaking, because infant mortality alone trounces the figures above. But to be intellectually honest, we should exclude infant mortality, given it’s also not what most people mean when they are talking about things that harm children. Further, some amount of infant mortality is sadly unavoidable, even in our modern age, and we shouldn’t use it as a crutch to disregard all smaller, but still significant problems.
However, that still doesn’t make gun-related deaths take the lead among children. Thanks to the CDC, we also know that unintentional deaths are a far bigger killer of children than all gun-related causes are. Motor vehicle traffic accidents alone, for example, kill 859 children per year. The numbers get larger depending on whether or not you want to put “unintentional” deaths (besides firearm-related ones) into one large category, or if you prefer to keep the categories divided into motor vehicle traffic deaths, suffocation deaths, and so forth. Regardless, gun-related causes are not even close to the largest killer of children ages 0-12.
So what about all those tragic news articles about kids accessing negligently-stored firearms like the ones I linked at the start of this article? In a country of over 330 million people, it’s easy for uncommon events to seem common thanks to news coverage. For instance, if one or two young children a week get ahold of an unsecured firearm and hurt themselves or someone else, that will generate enough news articles (50 to 100) in a given year to make it feel like a huge problem, even though it’s a statistical anomaly that affects a minuscule percentage of the nation’s approximately 50 million children under the age of 13.
In fact, overall unintentional gun deaths are way down in recent years, despite a huge increase of guns in circulation and population growth. We’ve gone from around 1,800 unintentional gun-related deaths per year in the 1970s, to around 500 per year now. Just since 1999, the rate has fallen from 0.3 per 100,000 deaths in 1999, to 0.2 in 2020 (1 in 500,000 people). In terms of raw numbers, there were 824 unintentional gun deaths in 1999, and 535 in 2020. Of course we want that number to be zero, but it’s not a statistically large problem at all. And the portion of it affecting children is even smaller.
In short, whenever gun control activists or the news media use a stock image of a toddler or other young child accessing a gun to go along with their articles about gun-related deaths among minors (see the top of this post), they’re being statistically dishonest.
Teenagers are more frequently killed by gun-related causes, but that paints an incomplete picture.
For minors age 13 to 17, it’s a different story. The antigun activists’ claims are true, at least statistically speaking. In this category, gun-related causes kill just under 2,200 teenagers per year, for an overall rate of 10.1 per 100,000. Among 17-year-olds specifically, the rate is a shocking 17.2 per 100,000. To compare, 1,485 teenagers were killed in motor vehicle traffic incidents in 2023. Gun-related causes thus truly are the biggest killer of teenagers, at least in 2023.
Of these 2,197 gun-related deaths among teens agesd13 to 17, 49 are unintentional, 719 are suicides, 1,370 are homicides, 15 are law enforcement shootings, and 44 are undetermined gun-related causes.
But this can’t be the end of the discussion, because it still hides the real underlying issue. This isn’t a general problem among teenagers across the country. Rather, it’s overwhelmingly a problem of violence in particular cities. The CDC hints at this through its urbanization measures, noting that over half of the gun-related deaths among teenagers happen in large central metro areas or large fringe metro areas.
There are also significant racial disparities at play here. For firearm-related suicides among teenagers, non-Hispanic white teenagers lead at 450 deaths, a rate of 4.2 per 100,000, higher than any other subgroup.
But it’s in the homicides where racial disparities become truly eye-popping. While non-Hispanic white teenagers have a gun-related homicide rate of 1.3 per 100,000 and Hispanic teenagers are around 5.8 per 100,000, for black teenagers, the rate is an astounding 29.1 per 100,000. Out of the nearly 2,200 gun-related deaths among teenagers, black teenagers killed in homicides account for 868 of them, hugely out of step with their share of the teenage population (despite white households tending to have more guns).
If this were corrected and teenage gun-related homicides in the black community were finally made to be in line with their population share, gun-related deaths would once again fall below motor vehicle traffic deaths as the biggest killer of teenagers.
In a way then, the frequent talking point that “guns are the biggest killer of children and teenagers” is just another iteration of the actual root problem of gun-related death in America: the massive amount of violence victimizing (and being perpetrated by) black Americans, primarily teenagers and young men. I have written about this sensitive topic before and encourage you to read that article also for a fuller statistical grasp of the daunting situation.
Conclusion: What we should do to reduce gun-related deaths among minors
In short, gun-related causes are not a major killer of children. They are a major killer of teenagers, but not all teenagers equally. Instead of spreading misleading statistics lacking context, we should address three separate problems to get these numbers as close to zero as possible:
- While gun-related deaths among young children are increasingly rare in recent years, we should continue to encourage gun owners with children to lock up any guns not being carried on their person. This is the most preventable category of gun-related deaths. We’ve made great progress here, but can make even more. There is no reason any child in America should be stumbling across an unsecured gun, and gun owners who leave guns unsecured with children in the house should face prosecution and/or civil liability for their reckless disregard of basic safety principles.
- If a teenager in your household is battling depression, then securing your firearms or perhaps even getting them out of the house temporarily, is a necessity. Suicides involving guns claim the lives of around 700 teenagers per year and many of those too are preventable. But it’s important to treat the underlying cause itself as there are plenty of other methods of suicide, too.
- Lastly, there is the far more difficult problem of gun-related violence in the black community, which as the data I’ve presented shows, doesn’t spare teenagers. The solutions to this challenge will need to be based on a long-term approach and wide-ranging strategies, and I certainly don’t know what all of those are. I made a couple of suggestions towards the end of my prior article on that topic. This will need to be an all hands on deck cultural shift, but distressingly, it doesn’t seem like any such shift is imminent. There should be more urgency for solving a problem that has consistently taken such a horrible toll.
Regardless of the solutions, it’s important to be precise in describing these issues. Defining the problem as simply “gun violence is the number one cause of death in children and teens” is at best vague, and at worst propagandistic and intentionally misleading. Everyone should strive for greater honesty in these discussions, whether they favor or oppose expansive firearm rights.
Thanks for reading. Please consider becoming a member of or donating to CRPA so we can continue our efforts to restore the Second Amendment in California.
Konstadinos Moros is an Associate Attorney with Michel & Associates, a law firm in Long Beach that regularly represents the California Rifle & Pistol Association (CRPA) in its litigation efforts to restore the Second Amendment in California. You can find him on his Twitter handle @MorosKostas. To donate to CRPA or become a member, visit https://crpa.org/.
This post was adapted by SNW from an article posted by Konstadinos Moros at X.
It’s not complicated at all. Guns don’t kill people any more than cars, trucks, forks or spoons. They are all inanimate objects that cannot function without first being manipulated by a person. People kill people and for the most part use inanimate objects to do it.
Great dissemination! Unfortunately it will fall on the deaf ears of Dim officials, the usual university professors, and any main news dump outlet.
If the gun ban crowd wants to include adult teens in their calculations, then perhaps we oughta counter by including unborn children. Millions killed over several decades, for the sake of convenience.