The claim made by President Joe Biden during his Thursday night press briefing, stating that “more children are killed by a bullet than any other cause of death,” has been declared false. This misrepresentation is part of the ongoing and erroneous assertion made by left-leaning sources that firearms are the primary cause of child mortality. Breitbart News has consistently debunked this claim, revealing that the left often counts people aged 18 and 19 as children in their statistics.
The falsehood was first propagated by President Biden on June 2, 2022, when he claimed that “guns are the number one killer of children.” However, Breitbart News pointed to a report from FOX News that referenced CDC figures revealing that firearm-related deaths for individuals aged 0-19 totaled 4,368 in 2020. In contrast, motor vehicle fatalities for the same age group amounted to 4,036 during the same period.
Breitbart further demonstrated that by conducting a custom search of CDC data, limiting the category of “children” to those aged 0-17 (i.e., those below voting age), the numbers would drastically change. In this scenario, the number of firearm-related deaths for children aged 0-17 was 2,281 in 2020, while motor vehicle fatalities for the same ages were 2,503.
Moreover, CDC data that is frequently overlooked by left-leaning sources reveals that even if we maintain the age range of 0-19, unintentional car deaths in 2020 among individuals in this age group were 27 times higher than unintentional gun deaths within that same age range. AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio, a member of Gun Owners of America, and the director of global marketing for Lone Star Hunts. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2010 and has a Ph.D. in Military History. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at [email protected].