Editor’s Note (March 27, 2023): Today, a shooter killed at least six people, including three children, at a Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee.american children
For the last several decades, motor vehicle crashes have been the most common cause of traumatic death and the top cause of death in general among children, teenagers, and young adults in the United States. And in recent years, guns have overtaken car crashes as the leading cause of injury-related deaths in ages 1 to 24.
The switch that occurred in 2017 has been attributed to both a decline in vehicle-related deaths and a sharp increase in gun-related deaths. The number of firearm-related deaths in the age group 0 to 24 increased from 7.3 per 100,000 to 10.28 per 100,000. Over the same period, motor vehicle-related deaths decreased from 13.62 to 8.31 per 100,000 people.
“Crossing these trend lines will help us understand how concerted approaches to injury prevention can reduce injuries and deaths, and conversely, how public health problems could be in the absence of such attention. It shows how it can get worse,” writes Lois Lee, senior associate in medicine. In a recent analysis of CDC data, she and her colleagues at Boston Children’s Hospital found: New England Journal of Medicine.
The decline in vehicle fatalities is largely the result of concerted efforts to track and research motor vehicle accidents. Congress established the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in 1970 to save lives and prevent traffic-related injuries. One of the agency’s primary actions was to create and maintain a public database of motor vehicle crashes on US roads. This has allowed researchers to identify ways to improve safety.
In contrast, there is no federal agency to regulate firearm safety, and it took decades just to develop a national database to track firearm deaths, Lee and her colleagues say. points out in the paper. Additionally, from 1996 to 2018, a special treaty in a government spending bill called the Dickey Amendment effectively dissuaded the CDC from funding research on gun injury prevention. A ban on the CDC from using its funds to “advocate or promote gun control” has frozen gun violence research at the CDC. This widely interpreted directive was extended to the National Institutes of Health in late 2011. In 2018, Congress reinterpreted the Dickey Amendment to allow such research, and funding was finally granted in late 2019.
“There is strong funding for automotive-related research and interventions,” Lee says, but “after 25 years of little funding, federal funding for firearms research is just beginning. ”
Lee and her colleagues credit vehicle safety improvements to save the lives of children and teens. These measures include automatic braking and side airbags, booster seat laws and tiered licensing. All U.S. states require a license and registration to drive a vehicle, but a loophole in federal law makes it illegal in many states to purchase a gun from an unlicensed dealer without even conducting a background check. I can. Federal law also protects firearm manufacturers from allegations of negligence, including when a firearm falls into the hands of a child, with deadly consequences, according to Lee and her team.
Linda DeGutis, a lecturer at the Yale School of Public Health and former director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, said the new findings about mortality trends among young people aren’t surprising. “Given that our environment has firearms and includes children, we weren’t very focused on interventions, how to keep people safe,” said the new analysis. No DeGutis says, “We have been able to reduce the number of motor vehicle deaths among children and young people. [and] We’ve done it using interventions that don’t eliminate cars….we haven’t focused on the same kind of strategy with guns. ”
Many experts argue that high rates of gun deaths among young people are not inevitable and that collecting data and conducting research can prevent such deaths.
“As progress in reducing motor vehicle fatalities shows, we do not need to accept the high rate of firearm-related deaths among children and adolescents in the United States.”
