This fact put in the media isn’t going to stop guns from getting to kids….
America HAS a gun culture that doesn’t care much about kids….
…according to an analysis published on Thursday, the rate of firearm fatalities among children under 18 increased by 87 percent from 2011 through 2021 in the United States. The death rate attributable to car accidents fell by almost half, leaving firearm injuries the top cause of accidental death in children.
The finding underscores additional data showing that firearm injuries are now the leading cause of death among Americans under 20, after excluding deaths of infants born prematurely or with congenital abnormalities.
Some 2,590 children and teenagers under the age of 18 died of firearm injuries in 2021, up from 1,311 in 2011, according to the study, which was published in the journal Pediatrics. In other industrialized countries, guns are not even among the top three causes of death for children.
Drug poisonings among children younger than 18 more than doubled, and suffocations increased by 12.5 percent, the researchers also found.
Great strides have been made toward protecting children from car accidents and deaths, including mandatory seatbelts, booster seats and airbags, said Dr. Rebekah Mannix, the paper’s lead author and a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Boston Children’s Hospital.
“The opposite is happening with firearms,” she added. “It’s just getting worse, and kids are dying at higher rates from firearms.”
Overall, the rate of nonfatal injuries dropped by more than half among children during the decade studied, from 11,592 per 100,000 to 5,359 per 100,000, while the rate of fatal injuries increased, from 14.07 per 100,000 children to 17.3 per 100,000, the study found.
“Firearms and drug poisonings are both exceptions to this, in that both the nonfatal injuries and the fatal injuries increased,” Ms. Mannix, a student at Middlesex School in Concord, Mass., said….