Accidental Gun Deaths Involving Children: Major And Understated Problem In The US, Report Shows

The official tally of minors killed by accidental or unintentional gun discharges, released last week by the Centers for Disease Control, significantly understates how bad the problem really is in the United States, an investigation by the Associated Press and USA Today Network has found.

The U.S. government said in its release that 77 minors were killed last year by accidental gunfire but the media’s review noted that there were at least 141 deaths that meet the criteria, the Associated Press reported Saturday. That 83 percent difference comes from differing counting methods: The government tally did not include deaths that coroners classified as homicides or gun deaths that coroners were unable to determine a motive for. The 2015 discrepancy is more severe than that of 2014, when the government missed a third of the 113 deaths of minors from guns.

The data also shows that most of the deaths, if not all of the deaths, are preventable. Three-year-old children are most likely to pick up firearms that are unsecured and accidentally discharge them, killing themselves or another minor. From there, another spike in deaths has been observed among minors between the ages of 15 and 17. The teenagers are most likely to be killed by another teen playing with an unsecured firearm.

Other attempts to evaluate the scope and severity of the issue by gun control advocacy groups have historically found the government data to underreport the issue as well. More than two-thirds of the child deaths could be avoided, advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety said in 2014, if gun owners would simply secure their firearms with locks or in safes and keep them unloaded when not in use. Most of the deaths occur at home or in a family vehicle.

Lobbyists for the firearms industry, including groups like the National Rifle Association, argue that accidental child gun deaths are so rare that voluntary education should be the go-to fix, not regulation.