If at first you don’t succeed, manufacture results to your liking: that seems to be the trick to getting sufficiently scary numbers into a study chaired by Dr. John Leventhal, a professor of pediatrics at the Yale School of Medicine.

Leventhal’s study, published today in Pediatrics, says that 10,000 children are killed or injured by guns each year, but to get to that magic five figures, he has to do a statistical shuck and jive:

Studying the 2009 Kids’ Inpatient Database (KID), which tracks pediatric hospital stays, the Yale researchers discovered 7,391 children under age 20 had been hospitalized for firearm related injuries, with 453 of those patients dying. The data in KID has been gathered since 1997 as part of the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project on behalf of the Department of Health and Human Services, with 2009 the most recent release.

Most of the injuries, 4,559, resulted from assaults, while 2,149 were from accidents and 270, the result of suicide attempts. The most common types of injury, were open wounds at 52 percent and fractures at 50 percent. Brain injuries were more common in the younger kids, most of whom were hurt in accidental shootings.

Yes, you read that bolded text correctly. The study dramatically inflates its count of “children” by including adults aged 18-19, and includes attacks (“assaults”) by criminal youths involved in drug-dealing, turf wars between gangs, drive-by shootings, home invasions, armed robbery etc., not just poor eight-year-old Timmy or five-year-old Sally finding an unsecured firearm (unsecured firearms are themselves quite troubling and preventable, but an entirely separate issue).

A USA Today reporter accidentally reports the depths of the study’s inconvenient truth:

Rates were highest for those ages 15 to 19 (27.94 per 100,000.)

Of all hospitalizations, 89% were males; the hospitalization rate for males was 15.22 per 100,000, compared with 1.93 per 100,000 for females. The hospitalization rate for black males was 44.77 per 100,000, more than 10 times that for white males.

The study detailed a significant racial gap: Black children and adolescents comprised 47% of all hospitalizations, 54% of hospitalizations resulting from assaults, 36% from unintentional injuries and 54% from undetermined causes.

Noting the significantly higher poverty rate for young black males compared with young white males, Sege says the data did not allow researchers to “separate the effects of poverty from the effects of race.”

Nor did the data indicate what types of guns were used or where the injury occurred.

The study obviously relied upon gang violence to inflate it’s number, but lacked the funding to discover where the injuries occurred. How convenient!

Luckily, we already know.

In an article entitled, “The Story Behind the Nation’s Falling Body Count,” Kennedy writes, “Research on hot spots shows violence to be concentrated in ‘micro’ places, rather than ‘dangerous neighborhoods,’ as the popular idea goes. Blocks, corners, and buildings representing just five or six percent of an entire city will drive half of its serious crime.”

The same is true about people. “We now know that homicide and gun violence are overwhelmingly concentrated among serious offenders operating in groups: gangs, drug crews, and the like representing under half of one percent of a city’s population who commit half to three-quarters of all murders.”

Read it once more: “ … under half of one percent … commit half to three-quarters of all murders.”

These “hot spots,” of course, are almost universally related to “gangs, and drug crews” in that all-important 15-19 male demographic.

Tellingly, the NBC reporter looked to the anti-gun, Joyce Foundation-supported Center for Gun Policy and Research in the Bloomberg School of Public Health for support:

“This study reinforces what we know from the mortality data,” said Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research. “We have an extraordinary health burden in our youth associated with firearms injuries.”

Webster, like the rest of his citizen control cult at Johns Hopkins, has a vested interest in conflating intentional gun crimes committed by gang-bangers with gun accidents involving children. It makes the various foundations supporting their “research” efforts happy.

I won’t bother to call into question the integrity of the researchers or the reporters… at this point, it seems quite obvious that they don’t have any to spare.