After the Uvalde school shooting, the CDC and the media are pushing a misleading claim that, “firearms were the leading cause of death for kids one and older for the first time in 2020.”
There’s no statistical reason for the CDC to group infants and teenagers together into the same category except to push a gun control agenda. 1-year-olds and 19-year-olds don’t have much in common when it comes to gun violence. And when the numbers are broken down, teenagers have catastrophically high murder and suicide rates, while babies are much less affected.
The CDC’s letter to the New England Journal of Medicine claims that “in 2020, firearm-related injuries became the leading cause of death” for “persons 1 to 19 years of age”. It blames that on the “COVID-19 pandemic” while shrugging that “the reasons for the increase are unclear”.
Blaming the upsurge in Chicago gang members shooting each other on a virus out of China based on correlation rather than causation is bound to lead to very “unclear” reasons.
The CDC buries the salient data in its appendix. It claims that the “increase was seen across most demographic characteristics”. Its own data however shows a massive increase among black teens and a fairly limited one among most other groups.
The CDC began “researching” gun violence for the first time last year and its latest release is a useful reminder of why Republicans and 2nd Amendment groups fought against letting it do it.
What the CDC is hiding is much more disturbing than its dishonest attempt to push gun control by panicking parents with statistical manipulation so bad it would embarrass a push pollster.
The Johns Hopkins report on gun deaths in 2020 put out last month was much more revealing.
It had the numbers that should have been front and center at the CDC, such as, “In 2020, one out of every 1,000 young Black males (15–34) was shot and killed.”
Even though young black males only make up “2% of the total population”, they account for “38% of all gun homicide fatalities” with a gun homicide rate “almost 21 times higher than white males of the same age group.”
“More than half of all black teens (15–19) who died in 2020—a staggering 52%—were killed by gun violence,” it shockingly observes.
You would think that the CDC would be interested in these numbers, instead of trying to hide them by combining all the demographics together and then conflating the risk for an Asian toddler in Marin with a black teen in Chicago in order to claim that “gun violence” is a crisis.
The crisis here is crime.
Black Lives Matter has called the rare police shootings of black men, “genocide”. But the real genocide is coming from inside the house. Even well before this the CDC’s own numbers found that among black men under the age of 20, homicide is the leading cause of death at 35.3%
