Firearms killed a record number of children in 2021, study finds
nbcnews.com
U.S. children and teens are more likely to die because of guns than car crashes, drug overdoses and cancer.
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U.S. children and teens are more likely to die because of guns than car crashes, drug overdoses and cancer.
It's so weird to file 18 and 19 year olds under "children". Aren't 18+ already considered adults and their lifestyle is going to be more risky than an actual child in grade school?
If you kept it at actual "minors", I wonder how this data would look.
It's kind of like saying that car accidents are a major cause of death in children because they drive too fast.
The article discusses this.
Poking around the CDC website adolescence is defined in multiple ways but generally includes ages 12-19, so might be better described as "teens" even though 18+ is a legal adult. I think it's being treated here as more of a developmental stage than a legal one.
Digging into it by age, from 2018-2021 firearms made up 2,149 out of 22,545 total deaths (~9%) for the age range 5-14 in the US. Looking at 15-19 this increases significantly to 13,321 out of 46,323 total deaths (~29%). This corresponds to increases in both homicide and suicide by firearm for older adolescents.
Quoting this just to make the point that firearms do have differing impacts on younger and older children, and that extends to race and income level as well. But whether guns are the leading cause of death for an age group or not, the end result is the same: more dead kids.
I'm more interested right now in the obvious agenda.
I'm not saying that child death's aren't up or that we shouldn't do more to protect them but when citing data this way, I get the very strong feeling that it's being made to look worse than it is on purpose. The majority are from suicides and murder fatalities are extreme in the 18-19 year old bracket.
Why on earth does the metric include 18 and 19 year olds as children if not for making something look worse.
The dictionary defines a child as a person between birth and puberty. Or not having attained the age of legal majority.
It's similar to when a 10 year old gets shot by the police, and then the news conference later has the police referring the 10 year old victim as "a young man" instead of "the child". Does it not feel like they're trying to achieve something?
Honestly, I tried pretty hard to find a good reason and other than the fact that the CDC groups data into <1, 1-4, 5-9, 10-14, and 15-19 age ranges there’s no real explanation. You could go up to 14, and then get individual year data up to 17/18 whatever the cutoff.
I wouldn’t say it’s totally dishonest because it is baked into the data and the CDC considers them developmentally similar, but I think it also an issue NBC wasn’t too interested in fixing because it makes the article’s argument seem more convincing.
Yeah, it's misleading. Especially considering the hot topic use of firearms.
Regardless of which side of the fence you sit on, we can agree that data should be free of the organization present here. The discussion isn't helped by this interpretation of the interpretation and it surely needs helping.
It's the Same Old Same Old "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" authoritarian push to limit the freedoms of the citizenry. Communists, Terrorists, Pedophiles, and Satanists are all coming to get your babies and only Big Brother can save you by restricting your naughty freedoms.
The reality is that if you look at the overall statistics, 99.9999% of children aged 0-18 in the USA are unaffected by gun violence. So I am not compelled to trade any of my freedom for more alleged safety.
Risky lifestyle goes pew pew pew.
The numbers are just weird in that article.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/
I am going to read it again and see where their data is sourced.Ok, it seems that Pew and NBC used CDC stats. Still, NBC is not presenting data in a very informative way.
Any deaths are bad, but I prefer to see the whole picture and not what is cherry picked for a news article.
Of course they not, because its not about the info or the facts, its about the agenda...
They’re dead 18 year olds. If my 18 year old child died, I wouldn’t debate their age or the statistics.
More than 1 accidental death is 1 too many.
I'm not arguing that though. I totally agree that any loss of life is wrong.
And the use of child in your context is different from the use of child in the context of this discussion.