A common trope of the anti-freedom crowd is that gun owners are selfish. They have these horrible and dangerous tools, but because we love guns so much we’re willing ignore the deaths.
Namely crap like this:
But I found this very telling graphic:
First up we’ll take the “Facts” at face value (then we’ll look at how legitimate they are). If guns are the THIRD leading cause of death, why are they spending all their time on them? Further we’ll get into how steep the drop off from #1 to #3 is. We’re looking at anti-gun activists stepping over a LOT of bodies before they get to their pet cause. Sounds pretty selfish to me!
I went to the CDC to look at the stats myself. This PDF is the best I could find. First the age groups are <1, 1-4, 5-9, 10-14, 15-24 for "Children" (Of course the bulk of that last demographic is legal adulthood) For 0-14 "Homicide" (no separate field for “Gun Death”) is 2nd and 3rd. Also the “Unintentional Injury” is #1 all the way to middle age. From the CDC I found this:
Drowning is a leading cause of unintentional injury death worldwide, and the highest rates are among children (1). Overall, drowning death rates in the United States have declined in the last decade; however, drowning is the leading cause of injury death among children aged 1–4 years (2,3). In 2001, approximately 3,300 persons died from unintentional drowning in recreational water settings, and an estimated 5,600 were treated in emergency departments
So we’re looking at a LOT of drowning deaths. In my comments I found Linoge did some work with the CDC data:
For 1-4, you are looking at unintentional drowning (22.3%), unintentional motor vehicle traffic (20.8%), unintentional fire/burn (9.9%), homicide unspecified (8.5%), and unintentional suffocation (7.2%). So do you ask about all of the various ways those fatalities can come to pass, or do you exclusively focus on on the 2.3% that die from “homicide firearms”? Is it any wonder we call you “myopic”?
For 5-9, we have unintentional motor vehicle traffic (40.4%), unintentional fire/burn (12.1%), unintentional drowning (10.8%), homicide firearm (4.2%), and unintentional suffocation (3.7%). Again, where do you think your focus should lie?
And finally, for 10-14, we have unintentional motor vehicle traffic (41.8%), homicide firearm (9.2%), suicide suffocation (7.1%), unintentional drowning (6.1%), and unintentional other land transport (4.8%). Firearms finally shoulder their way into the top three, and that vindicates your stupidity, right? Wrong. These children were killed by people wielding firearms, yes, but no mention of the age of the person doing the killing is made, and, unfortunately, this age bracket is where gangs start their recruitment. Unintentional firearm deaths rank in at 1.6%.
So I wonder if in this “1-17” guns really are #3. Further we’re looking at a TEN FOLD difference from #1 to “Gun Death”. Hell various diseases really dwarf injuries of any kind.
Also in the firearms section you see the term “Age Adjusted” in most of the charts. Age adjustment when it comes to 1-17 age just means the data is cooked to make things look a LOT worse. They add more weight to the “Gun Deaths” of the 15-17 demographic because those are the ages more likely to be in a violent criminal lifestyle. The gun seems to be less of a problem than the culture.
So yeah, it likely ISN’T the 3rd leading cause, but even then we’re talking a significant number at #1 (40%) to a tenfold difference at #3 (4%) and well over half of all fatal injuries are ignored before they get to their pet cause.
Pretty brutal stuff there!
