It was arguably Bill Clinton who began and constantly pushed the idea that the leading cause of death among children is “gun violence.” Dredging up false statistics to “prove” that assertion, he had to count teenagers and 18+ year-old gang bangers killed in turf shootouts as children. And violence is committed only by people, not inanimate objects.

Graphic: Glock 17. Author.

Recently, the Ad Council has picked up that mendacious tactic:  

In recent months television viewers have been subjected to a series of anti-gun propaganda pieces produced by the Ad Council. Dubbed the Agree to Agree campaign, the ads typically feature a misleading talking point about “children” and firearms followed by an invitation to go to the Ad Council effort’s website where visitors are bombarded with further gun control agitprop. The website even invites visitors to learn about how to secure red flag gun confiscation orders.

Sponsoring those ads are the usual suspects: Brady, Giffords, Everytown for Gun Safety, Bloomberg and more. Are the ads accurate?  Not so much:

Consider the data on those who may be properly defined as children – ages 0-14. For this cohort, firearm-related injuries are not the leading causes of death and are not higher than motor vehicle deaths. The number of motor vehicle deaths in this age group was more than 40-percent higher than firearm-related deaths in 2023.

This does shift when examining the cohorts ages 15-17, 15-19, or 15-24. Roughly 70-percent of the firearm-related deaths that occur in the 0-17 age group happened among the juveniles ages 15-17 in 2023. This disparity shouldn’t be surprising. The 15-17 cohort is far more often engaged in the type of street crime that can give rise to firearm-related violence and that many jurisdictions have decided to address in a more lenient manner in recent years. The conflation of this age group with young children is even more absurd when one considers that, in the vast majority of jurisdictions, those aged 15 and older can be prosecuted as adults.

When politicians, particularly Democrats, are pushing an unsupportable policy, they inevitably scream we must accept their destructive lunacy “for the children.” It’s rather like why they usually call themselves “progressives.” Who can be against progress? Any sane American if Democrats are pushing it. “We must do it for the children” is no more convincing and should compel Normal Americans to check their wallets.  

Dr. John R. Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center drives Democrats crazy. He provides his data sets and methodology, something Democrat “science” rarely if ever does, which makes a mockery of his political opponents. An example:

The first question is: What is a child? For those under 18, vehicle deaths are consistently greater than those from firearms. Adding homicides, unintentional deaths, and suicides together shows 2,443 total deaths from vehicles and 2,218 from firearms. In 2021, there were again 2,668 vehicle and 2,519 firearm deaths. When we exclude justifiable homicides that are committed in self-defense by civilians and police, that number falls by over several hundred. 

So, even if we are counting 17-year-old gang members as “children,” the White House’s claim is incorrect. In 2019 and 2020, more minors died from suffocation.

It gets worse for anti-liberty/gun cracktivists:

For those under 20, firearm deaths exceed vehicle deaths for 2020 and 2021 when you use the CDC firearm homicide data. When you use the FBI data, the vehicle deaths exceed the firearm deaths for 2019 and 2020, and likely 2021, though the FBI data isn’t available for that year.

Lott suggests a partial reason for Democrat lies:

Democrats can’t accept their responsibility for increased violent crime in 2020 and 2021. They want to blame guns, and there’s no better way to do so than to keep claiming that guns are the number one killer of “children.”

Any child’s death by any cause is tragic, and so are the criminal deaths of any adult. Yet many Democrats are celebrating and mocking the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Democrats never balance the good done by Americans in lawful self-defense with the harm caused by illegally gun-toting criminals. Americans use guns to defend themselves and others as many as 2.5 million times every year. Even the gun-banning Clinton administration did a study expecting to find data in support of more gun control but found 1.5 million lawful self-defense incidents per year. Ooops.

But if banning all guns saves even one child, we must do it! No. Not even if 20-year-olds are counted as children. The Second Amendment is an inalienable, fundamental, individual right. That means gun bans are off the table, the guns that every year save children’s lives.

Become a subscriber and get our weekly, Friday newsletter with unique content from our editors. These essays alone are worth the cost of the subscription. 

Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.