Guns Now the Leading Cause of Death in Kids in the US

Since 2017, children have been statistically more likely to be killed by a gun than a car.

As heartbreaking images of mass shootings once again sweep the nation — the murders of 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, shortly on the heels of the racially motivated mass shooting in Buffalo, New York — a new analysis has found that guns have outpaced car crashes as the leading cause of death for U.S. youngsters.

The paper, published April 21 in the New England Journal of Medicine, compiled CDC data on injury-related deaths among individuals between 1 and 24 years of age from 2000 to 2020. The results show that while gun deaths in this age group rose 45% to 10,186 (10.28 per 100,000 persons) in 2020, motor vehicle-related deaths dropped nearly 40% to 8234 (8.31 per 100,000 persons). In 2017, car crashes — which had been the top cause of death for people aged 1-24 for more than 60 years — were outpaced by firearms.

Credit: New England Journal of Medicine

The study’s authors suggested that while the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration — a federal agency — gathers important data on vehicle-related deaths, and state policies regulate licensing and registration, there is significantly less research and oversight related to the purchase, ownership and use of guns.

“Due to intentional, continuous improvements in motor vehicle safety, we have seen a substantial decline in motor vehicle injuries and deaths in this age group,” lead author Lois Lee, an ER doctor and associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard, said in an audio interview accompanying the article. “We have seen the opposite, however, with firearms.” She noted the lack of a federal agency focused on the safety of firearms or national funding for firearm injury prevention, in contrast with the efforts made to prevent motor vehicle accidents.

Linda Degutis, former director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control and a lecturer at the Yale School of Public Health, told Scientific American that the researchers’ findings were not unexpected. “We have not focused as much on interventions, on how we can keep people safe, given that there are firearms in our environment — and that includes children,” Degutis said. “We have been able to decrease fatalities from motor vehicle crashes in children and in young adults, [and] we’ve done it by using interventions that didn’t eliminate motor vehicles. […] We have not focused on that same kind of strategy with guns.”

While some family members of mass shooting victims believe in loosening gun laws in response, many are adamant about the need for stricter reforms to prevent gun deaths. “We live in this really small town in this red state, and everyone keeps telling us, you know, that it’s not the time to be political, but it is — it is,” Kimberly Rubio, a mother who lost her 10-year-old daughter to the Uvalde shooter, told the New York Times. “Don’t let this happen to anybody else.”