President’s Day on Ethics Alarms continues with another Biden Presidency Whopper. Once again, Biden, his mouthpieces at the White House, and VP Kamala Harris have stated in public that “Gun violence is the leading cause of death of children.” It isn’t. They keep saying this and it keeps being repeated by the mainstream news media, but the stat is as much of a lie as other hoary progressive myth narratives, my favorite being that women only earn 70 cents for every dollar men earn for the same jobs.
The reason for the fake gun stat is almost too obvious: it feeds neatly into “Think of the children!” hysteria and the media fearmongering narrative that every child is risking his or her life by going to school. It is an example of the tried-and-true fallacy the appeal to emotion. By all means, lets gut individual rights of self-defense, because if it only saves one child’s life….!!!
Washington Post “Fact Checker” Glenn Kessler, as I’ve noted before, seems to really want to be a fair and objective commentator but somehow can’t quite manage it. That’s Kessler’s
“Bottomless Pinocchio” above—if you can’t see it, it’s because WordPress’s image embedding feature stopped working a few minutes ago. If you recall, it shows a pile of little Pinocchio heads, which Kessler uses to denote a lie that the same public figure uses no matter how many times it’s proven false. The device was created for Donald Trump. In contrast, Biden’s repeated lies are seldom flagged by Kessler or anyone else. As Kessler has explained it, Trump lies, but “Biden loves to retell certain stories. Some aren’t credible” .
Apparently the fake gun stat triggered someone at the Post to suggest to Glenn that if he wanted to maintain any credibility so he can properly join the Post’s efforts to re-elect Biden by trashing Trump on the way to November, he had better deal with this perpetual li…I mean “story.” So Kessler writes in part,
…the source cited in the White House news release — a 2022 study by the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at Johns Hopkins University — ….cites gun deaths of “children and teens,” meaning it includes deaths of 18- and 19-year-olds, who are legally considered adults in most states. When you focus only on children — 17 and younger — motor vehicle deaths (broadly defined) still rank No. 1, as they have for six decades…The National Institutes of Health…defines a child as “an individual under the age of 18 years.” The European Union has a similar definition. The United Nations, in the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, says “a child means every human being below the age of eighteen years.”
…The Johns Hopkins study cited by the White House, which was updated in 2023, and another often-cited study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2022 and updating a previous study, do not include children under 1 because they have perinatal deaths and congenital anomalies — unique, age-specific death risks. This decision marginally reduces the number of children killed by firearms — amounting to less than 1 percent. But it greatly reduces the number of motor vehicle deaths — by as much as 4 percent.
Ethics Alarms 
It seems to me that the leading cause of death in children under 18 is abortion. Leaving that one out, we should examine the leading killer of children who use guns in committing acts of violence. We may just have to face the fact that it is black teens who are those killed and who kill.
You can get a t-shirt from a WMAL talk radio host that says “It’s not the guns, it’s your sons”. We might have to expand that to end the slaughter, mind your daughter.
Kessler plays to the paying crowd. He is not a fact checker. He is a fraud.
“…very soon firearm deaths … will exceed motor vehicles deaths”
I’ve seen multiple variations of this claim since 1988, the downward trend in automobiles mainly driven by improvements in safety systems.
The per-capita number of operable firearms has greatly outstripped the proportion of operating automobiles since 1988 and yet these lines still have not crossed.
I’m just going to file this along with “Manhattan will look like Venice” and “They’ll have to rename Glacier National Park”.
“Do not include children under 1 because they have perinatal deaths and congenital anomalies — unique, age-specific death risks. This decision marginally reduces the number of children killed by firearms — amounting to less than 1 percent.”
But it also eliminated about 20,000 deaths from those “unique and age-specific risks”, which would immediately eclipse deaths by firearms by a large margin, and spoil the inflammatory messaging. If you actually want to know what’s killing American children, it is precisely these “unique and age specific risks”. If, however, you want to spread propaganda against gun rights, I suppose that just gets in the way.
I see the blockquote tags no longer work. Thanks, WordPress.
I think I pointed out in another comment that this is set up by the CDC figures on firearm deaths. For other causes of death, children may be defined as 1-14 years old, or 1-17 years old. For firearms, it goes up to 19 and is the only category I have found that does this. They only report the data for groups and the groups are different for each cause.
Reporting the data this way means that you cannot compare deaths of children for different causes, only the CDC has the data and they are not releasing it in a useful form. This has to be on purpose, because compiling the data in useful form is these employees’ ONLY JOB. Yet again, we find that we cannot trust our benevolent overlords in the federal bureaucracy and that we are probably better off without them.
For added insanity, soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan may count in the ‘deaths of children’ category. So, Biden is guilty of sending children to their death by firearm in places like Ukraine. How many ‘children’ have been killed their because of Biden’s insistence that the Russians be fought to the last Ukrainian?