If you’ve spent any time online or listening to the news in the past two weeks you’ve probably heard one factoid in particular bandied about by those in favor of gun control. Guns are now the leading cause of death among children, surpassing car accidents and cancer. This point has been made by people like White House spokesperson Karine Jean Pierre who explicitly connected the death toll to Republicans in Congress.

Karine Jean-Pierre, "Guns as we know is the leading cause killing our kids, and they (Republicans) refuse to show some courage and do anything about it, and that's shameful." pic.twitter.com/o5KRRE4tgs

— Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) March 29, 2023

There are different sources of information for this claim but one of the ones often cited is this letter in the New England Journal of Medicine which was based on CDC data released last summer. A couple points about this. First, if you hear people citing it, they’ll often claim, incorrectly, that it shows guns are a leading cause of death among children. But the headline of the letter points out the problem: “Current Causes of Death in Children and Adolescents in the United States.”

For whatever reason, the data looked at included teens up to age 19. In other words, some of these people were not children at all but adult teens. This is made clear in the letter itself.

The previous analysis, which examined data through 2016, showed that firearm-related injuries were second only to motor vehicle crashes (both traffic-related and nontraffic-related) as the leading cause of death among children and adolescents, defined as persons 1 to 19 years of age. Since 2016, that gap has narrowed, and in 2020, firearm-related injuries became the leading cause of death in that age group (Figure 1).

So anyone citing this really ought to say the results are about “children and adolescents” not just “children.” But frequently that doesn’t happen, as is the case in the clip above. Still, the question is why is this happening? Why are gun deaths up among children and teens? To that question, the NEJM letter included a helpful graph:

As you can see, the yellow line relating to firearm injuries spikes on the far right, passing motor vehicle accidents. That spike happened in 2020.

Last week, Pew Research released a report based on the latest CDC data which includes 2021. Like the data above, it shows a spike over the past two years:

Notice that this chart looks at deaths among those under 18, described by Pew as “children and teens.” Pew connects this increase to the increase in shootings and homicides that we saw in 2020 and 2021 nationwide.

In 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic, there were 1,732 gun deaths among U.S. children and teens under the age of 18. By 2021, that figure had increased to 2,590.

The gun death rate among children and teens – a measure that adjusts for changes in the nation’s population – rose from 2.4 fatalities per 100,000 minor residents in 2019 to 3.5 per 100,000 two years later, a 46% increase…

The rise in gun deaths among children and teens is part of a broader recent increase in firearm deaths among Americans overall. In 2021, there were 48,830 gun deaths among Americans of all ages – by far the highest yearly total on record and up 23% from the 39,707 recorded in 2019, before the pandemic.

In other words, the rise in gun deaths among children and teens tracks with the rise in violent crime we’ve been writing about for more than two years. If you’ve been following that discussion you know that various explanations have been made for that sudden rise in violence. Some have pointed to the the pandemic, to a surge in gun purchases while others have argued the timing of the rise seems to connect most closely with the murder of George Floyd.

Why would the murder of George Floyd have a connection to a nationwide rise in crime? Well, as you probably remember there were nationwide protests over Floyd’s death and the general tenor of the national conversation was anti-police. Some also came forward at this time with the idea of defunding the police. A few cities embraced the idea and some actually did cut funding. And from that point onward major cities like Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, New York, etc. saw a decline in the number of police on staff as officers resigned seemingly because they didn’t want to work in a place where they were seen as the enemy or were simply seen as racists.

Again, there continue to be disagreements over the cause of the sudden increase in violent crime in 2020 and it’s possible several factors are involved. Still, there is at least some evidence that policing was impacted by the messages coming from BLM protesters and from elected Democrats who embraced those messages in major cities. If so, then arguably the reason for the spike in gun deaths among American children and teens that so many on the left are currently pointing to with dismay is the leftist enthusiasm circa 2020 for an untested policy shift (defund the police) and more broadly for anti-police sloganeering that impacted the morale of police departments around the country.

Instead of blaming Republican office-holders for failing to support more gun control, perhaps Republicans should blame the activists who promoted defunding the police a few years ago and the Democrats who embraced their message because that’s arguably how we got to where we are now.

Addendum: Meant to add this point above but ran out of time. People on all sides are understandably angry about children being killed in Uvalde or Nashville. But I suspect when activists and politicos talk about gun deaths in the wake of an event like these they are, intentionally or not, misleading people about what is going on. Most of the deaths captured in that CDC data involve older teens, mostly males, who are victims of street violence.

Older children and teens are much more likely than younger kids to be killed in gun-related incidents. Those ages 12 to 17 accounted for 86% of all gun deaths among children and teens in 2021, while those 6 to 11 accounted for 7% of the total, as did those 5 and under. Still, there were 179 gun deaths among children ages 6 to 11 and 184 among those 5 and under in 2021.

This is a situation where no deaths are acceptable. Still, it’s worth keeping in mind what is actually happening if we’re going to address it properly. Most of these deaths involve older male teens who were probably hit by crossfire in gang-related shootings in high crime areas of major cities. Also, most of these victims were probably shot with handguns, not AR-15s. The solution to bringing these crimes against children under control is the same as the solution to bringing violent crime down in general. It starts with more police who can investigate and solve these crimes followed by more prosecutions to hold those people who commit crimes against children responsible.