By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
The National Rifle Association is alleging that “gun control activists and their media lackeys” are manipulating CDC fatal injury data “to push a misleading factoid on children and firearms.”
That is, they are combining firearm-related fatalities among children aged 1-14 with data covering teens and young adults aged 15-19 and presenting the combined data to claim more children are dying from “gun violence” than in car crashes.
This comes as a group calling itself Parents Together Action posts a report on its website which says “Fentanyl is now the leading cause of accidental death for young Americans, killing more people than suicide, car accidents, or gun violence. It is found in every part of the United States.”
Last month, Breitbart reported how former President Barack Obama tweeted a comment following the Nashville school shooting, also repeating the claim guns kill more kids than cars.
Also last month, CNN reported—couching its language—that “Guns are the leading cause of death for US children and teens, since surpassing car accidents in 2020.
Firearms accounted for nearly 19% of childhood deaths (ages 1-18) in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Wonder database. Nearly 3,600 children died in gun-related incidents that year. That’s about five children lost for every 100,000 children in the United States. In no other comparable country are firearms within the top four causes of mortality among children, according to a KFF analysis.” KFF is the Kaiser Family Foundation.
According to the NRA, “The next time you see a shocking headline about children and firearms, keep in mind how those pushing a political agenda have no interest in the truth.”
CNN isn’t the only news network apparently fooled by the data manipulation. Fox News also reported, “While studies in 2016 found that motor vehicle accidents surpassed gun deaths for children, a roughly 30% spike in the latter between 2019 and 2020 made firearms the leading cause of death, according to an analysis of CDC data published in the New England Journal of Medicine in late April.
The CDC reported 4,368 child deaths by gunfire in 2020, the vast majority of which were homicides, followed by suicides. Unintentional gun deaths and deaths where a motive could not be determined accounted for a very small portion of the data.”
But Fox at least added, “The CDC data defines children and adolescents as anyone 19 years old or younger.”
TGM did a little math, checking CDC data for 2020 and found 2,281 deaths in the age group 0-17 listed under “All Intents Firearm Deaths.” For the same age group, the data showed “All Intents Motor vehicle, overall Deaths 0-17” to be 2,462.
Jump up a notch to the number of deaths adjusted to 0-19 years and in the motor vehicle category, there were 3,988 fatalities, while in the firearm deaths category, the number spikes to 4,368.
Playing with data is nothing new. For years, the gun prohibition lobby has classified all firearm-related fatalities as victims of “gun violence.” This applies to homicide, suicide and accidents, for which the combined number might lead one to believe all of these deaths are the result of crime.
