Guns are the leading cause of death of kids and teens, and state laws matter [View all]

Source: NPR

States with permissive gun laws experienced a rise in pediatric deaths from firearm injuries between 2011 and 2023, whereas states with stricter laws did not. That's according to a new study published in JAMA Pediatrics.

"We know that the leading cause of death in children is firearm injuries," says Dr. Maya Haasz, an emergency medicine doctor and researcher at the University of Colorado, who wasn't involved in the new study. In a policy brief from 2021, she and her colleagues found that a child or teen is killed in the U.S. every 2 hours and 48 minutes.

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The study "adds more robust evidence," supporting that states with more lenient gun laws have more pediatric deaths from gunshots, says Dr. Chethan Sathya, a pediatric surgeon and director of the Center for Gun Violence Prevention at Northwell Health in New York. He wasn't involved in the new study.

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"In this study, for every fatality they captured, there are going to be countless more kids in those states that had non-fatal injuries and their lives are going to forever be altered," Sathya says.

Read more: https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/06/11/nx-s1-5429711/gun-deaths-state-laws-jama-pediatrics

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Important.study - and exactly the sort of study gun manufacturers and advocates don't want done. Expect the Trump regime to do whatever it can to stop or counter such studies.

According to the abstract in JAMA

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abstract/2834530

the study was done with an online CDC database.

And we know how the Trump regime likes to disappear data.