Friday's post on Science-Based Medicine was titled Normalizing Dead Children, and while it started by referencing child mortality from COVID, its primary focus was the increase in youth deaths from guns. The author, neurologist and psychiatrist Jonathan Howard, included this chart from a recent New England Journal of Medicine research letter:
As the chart shows, for the first time, more young people in the U.S. have died from fire arms than motor vehicle crashes — starting in 2017. And particularly after 2019, the number of gun deaths went up more quickly, even though the crash numbers also went up during the pandemic.
For comparison, you would have to go back to 2008 to reach a point in the crash data that would equal the 2020 gun death numbers.
This article from NBC News sheds more light on the reasons:
A study published in February [link provided in the article] found that gun ownership increased during the coronavirus pandemic. As a result, more than 5 million children under 18 became newly exposed to guns in their households from January 2019 to April 2021.
A 2021 study, meanwhile, also reported a rise in firearm acquisitions after the pandemic started; that was correlated with higher rates of fatal and nonfatal gun injuries both suffered by young children and inflicted by them. The authors suggested that school closings and a resulting lack of adult supervision may have played a role in the trend.
[The author of the NEJM research letter, Jason] Goldstick also emphasized that the CDC’s mortality data do not capture the full scale of gun violence among kids and teens.
"For every fatal firearm injury, there’s a bunch of nonfatal firearm injuries,” Goldstick said. “There’s not really great data on nonfatal shootings in the U.S."
Here's an example from today's Star Tribune of an accidental shooting just like the kind described in the NBC story:
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