In the United States, more children and young people now die from guns than from traffic accidents, according to the health authority. It affects boys more often than girls.
Druid Hills – Guns have overtaken car accidents as the leading cause of death among children and adolescents in the United States. According to official data from the health authority CDC from 2020, a total of 4368 children and adolescents up to the age of 19 died from firearms. In comparison, there were 4,036 motor vehicle-related deaths – the leading cause of death in this age group to date.
The number of children and young people killed by firearms corresponds to a rate of 5.4 per 100,000. Almost two-thirds of these deaths were homicides.
The fact that deaths were replaced by vehicles at the top is probably also due to the fact that road safety measures have improved over the decades. Meanwhile, gun laws have been relaxed. The trend lines cross in 2020 – more recent data are not yet available.
The numbers were in a letter to the specialist magazine last week New England Journal of Medicine been published. This week, 19 children were killed in a school shooting in Texas.
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The letter’s authors noted that the new data is consistent with other evidence that gun violence has increased during the coronavirus pandemic for reasons that are not clear. However, “it cannot be assumed that it will later return to the level before the pandemic”.
Most gun-related deaths are suicides. School shootings, such as in Uvalde, Texas, account for only a small proportion of childhood gun deaths. Boys were six times more likely to die from a gun than girls.
Gun ownership: Expert calls for more research and a new course in politics
The deaths disproportionately affect black children and youth, who are more than four times as likely to die as white children. For these, vehicles still pose a greater threat. By region, the death rate from guns was highest in the capital, Washington, followed by the state of Louisiana and Alaska.
Holden Thorp, Editor-in-Chief of the leading trade journal Science, in an editorial Thursday, called for more research into the public health impact of gun ownership in order to bring about policy change. “Scientists should not stand idly by while others fight this matter out,” he wrote.
“More research into the public health impact of gun ownership will provide further evidence of the deadly consequences,” he continued. Thorp argued that serious mental illness, which is often blamed for gun attacks in the United States, is similarly prevalent in other countries where shooting sprees are not a regular occurrence. (AFP/frs)
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