According to KFF (which I hadn’t previously heard of, but describes itself as “the independent source for health policy research, polling, and news”), firearms are the leading cause of death among children in the United States.

Guns – including accidental deaths, suicides, and homicides – killed 4,357 children (ages 1-19 years old) in the United States in 2020, or roughly 5.6 per 100,000 children.

In each of the peer countries, guns kill fewer children than motor vehicles, cancer, congenital diseases, and other injuries, and often behind other conditions such as heart disease.

The U.S. is the only country among its peers that has seen a substantial increase in the rate of child firearm deaths in the last two decades (42%). All comparably large and wealthy countries have seen child firearm deaths fall since 2000. These peer nations had an average child firearm death rate of 0.5 per 100,000 children in the year 2000, falling 56% to 0.3 per 100,000 children in 2019.

KFF

This is certainly disturbing and upsetting. I suppose there is some context to consider. For example, children don’t die in large numbers of preventable diseases, which is a great thing, so when they do die it is mostly from rare diseases and accidehttps://www.kff.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/guntrol.pngnts. I would want to know how the U.S. compares in overall child mortality to the other industrialized countries considered in this study. Probably not favorably, but not mentioned in this study. I would be interested to know what the breakdown between children and older teens is, and what the breakdown between accidents, homicides, and suicides is. These are all tragedies, but each cause of death within each age group would have different root causes and different solutions.

Regardless, it is negligent and ignorant that we are letting this happen, and yet more proof our country is truly “exceptional”, just not in the good way.