Guns are now the leading cause of death for American children

WASHINGTON – Gun-related killings have eclipsed motor vehicle crashes as the primary cause of death among American children, according to official data, with 19 students killed in a Texas school shooting being the most recent example.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 4,368 children and adolescents under the age of 19 died from firearm-related injuries in 2020, a rate of 5.4 per 100,000.

Nearly two-thirds of the gun deaths were homicides.

Motor vehicles, the previous leading cause of mortality among this age group, were responsible for 4,036 deaths.

As road safety measures have improved over the decades, the difference has narrowed, but gun-related deaths have increased.

The trend lines crossed in 2020, the most recent year for which data is available, according to a study published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The new data was consistent with prior evidence that gun violence increased during the Covid-19 epidemic for unknown causes, but “it cannot be expected that (it) will later revert to pre-pandemic values,” according to the letter’s authors.

According to the recently updated CDC dashboard, roughly 30% of the deaths were suicides, slightly over 3% were unintentional, and 2% were of unknown purpose.

‘Deadly repercussions’

Only a few were labelled “legal intervention” or “self-defense.”

Black children and adolescents were more than four times as likely to die as white youngsters, for whom motor vehicles constituted a higher threat.

American Indians were the second most affected by guns.

Males, on the other hand, were six times more likely than females to be killed by a gun.

The capital, Washington, has the greatest rate of gun-related deaths, followed by Louisiana, and finally Alaska.

The data showed that, while mass shootings like the one in Uvalde are terrifying, they account for a small percentage of total kid gun deaths.

“Since the 1960s, ongoing efforts have been aimed toward preventing mortality from motor vehicle crashes,” said the authors of a recent letter to the New England Journal of Medicine, comparing the situation with that of firearms, where laws have been loosened.

Holden Thorp, the editor-in-chief of the prestigious journal Science, wrote an editorial on Thursday urging additional study into the public health effects of gun ownership in order to drive legislative reform.

“Scientists should not stand by and watch others wage this battle,” he stated.

“More research into the public health impacts of gun ownership will provide further evidence of its deadly consequences,” he continued, claiming that severe mental illness, which is often blamed for mass shootings, was prevalent at similar levels in other countries where mass shootings were not common.