Guns Leading Cause of Death For Children and Teens
In 2020, guns caused more deaths than car accidents among U.S. children and teens for the first time in the last 40 years, according to a paper published in The New England Journal of Medicine.Researchers used data recently released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to quantify the leading causes of death nationwide for individuals ages 1 to 19 and found that firearm-related deaths among children and adolescents increased by 29 percent from 2019 to 2020.Although firearm deaths in people of all ages in the United States is on the rise, the rate among children and adolescents was more than twice as high as the relative increase in the general population, according to the authors."The increasing rates of firearm mortality are a longer-term trend and demonstrate that…