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 0-14. Step two, combine that relatively low number with the far greater number of firearm-related deaths involving juveniles and young adults ages 15-17, 15-19, or even ages 15-24. Step three, present the resulting data as the shocking number of “children” (ages 0-17, 0-19 or 0-24) 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 15-17, 15-19, or 15-24. Roughly 70-percent of the firearm-related deaths that occur in the 0-17 age group happened among the juveniles ages 15-17 in 2023. This disparity shouldn’t be surprising. The 15-17 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 eventually escorted out by security.
Mastio eventually received an answer to his question when he contacted the public health 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.
Alternatively, 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 research of this character, 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.
The 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 (2008)), are bound by the Second Amendment. As a practical matter, the effects of the decision were muted.
The decision struck down Chicago 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-rights 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 rather 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, and 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 riot-filled 2020, the murder rate went up 50-percent.
As previously noted, juveniles ages 15-17 account for the overwhelming majority of firearm-related mortality among youth. That’s because the 15-17 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 would be quick to apply the same logic here as did the authors of the June 9 study in supposedly examining McDonald’s impact.
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