2023 data: Other causes of death to minors still outpace firearms

For those under age 18, vehicle deaths are consistently greater than those from firearms. When you use the FBI murder data, the vehicle deaths exceed the firearm deaths for 2019, 2020, 2022, and 2023 — and likely 2021, though the FBI data isn’t available for that year.

About 72% of the firearm murders for those under 18 involve 15-, 16-, and 17-year-olds. So that would be 40% of all the firearm deaths. About 57% of those involve 16- and 17-year-olds. That is 32% of all firearm deaths. These deaths are largely gang-related, and even banning guns is unlikely to stop drug gangs from getting a hold of guns to protect their extremely valuable drugs.

Suffocation deaths for those under 18 are greater than total firearm deaths using the FBI data in both 2019 and 2020 (2,253 and 2,110, respectively). It is almost the same as the number in 2022 and 2023 (2,154 and 2,042, respectively).

Suicides should also be excluded because the common claim is that if guns are eliminated, people either won’t try to commit suicide or cannot do it successfully. Yet in places where guns are banned, total suicide rates remain unchanged — people change how they commit suicide.

From 2019 to 2023, excluding firearm suicides would reduce numbers from the CDC by 27% to 39%. With the FBI murder data, firearm suicides make up 31% to 46% of the total. For example, in 2020, for those under age 20, removing suicides would reduce the number of firearm deaths using the numbers from the CDC from 4,253 to 2,960 and, using the FBI murder rate data, from 3,405 to 2,112.

There are many other very effective ways to commit suicide, such as hanging, walking in front of a train, jumping from a height, using explosives, or cyanide (source here). More on suicides is available here.

As to accidental gun deaths involving children, over the 10 years from 2011 to 2020, there was an average of 43 deaths per year for children under age 10. Over that period for children under age 18, it averaged 92 accidental gun deaths a year. For those under age 10, earlier research showed about two-thirds of those accidentally shot to death were shot by adult males, usually in their late 20s who have violent criminal records and are drug addicts or alcoholics.

Presumably, since these individuals are illegally owning guns, it is unlikely that even banning guns would have a significant impact on the rate of those accidental gun shots.

In summary, for those under age 18, total vehicle deaths are between 14% and 35% greater than firearm deaths from murder, suicides, and accidents in the years from 2020 to 2023. Even when you use homicides instead of murders, which includes justifiable homicides, vehicle deaths are 6% greater in 2021 and there is a less than 1% difference in 2022 and 2023.

Republished with permission from Crime Prevention Research Center. Sign up for CPRC's newsletters at crimepreventionresearchcenter.nationbuilder.com.

"Keep and Bear Radio" podcast playlist

With host Dean Rieck