The appropriate amount of violence we should see in this nation directed toward children is zero.

I’m going to go ahead and put that out there so there can be no misunderstanding or misrepresentation going forward. I’m also going to put out there that I’m not remotely deluded enough to think that will ever be the case.

However, it’s also a major topic of discussion as we spend a great deal of time talking about, especially regarding mass shootings.

Over at The Atlantic, of course, writer Alia Wong wants to remind us all about the other kinds of violence against children.

Gun violence has killed nearly 1,200 children in the United States since the school massacre in Parkland, Florida, one year ago. Few of these deaths became the focus of the nation’s attention. Maybe that’s because these killings were so mundane, so normal, in the 21st-century United States.

A few weeks after the Parkland shooting, a 17-year-old high-school student in Birmingham, Alabama, named Courtlin Arrington, who’d long dreamed of becoming a nurse, was shot and killed in class, just months before she was to graduate. In July, three siblings—the oldest of whom was 6—were, according to news reports, murdered along with their mother by their father, who used the same gun to kill himself. A few months after that, a 17-year-old budding entrepreneur in Dayton, Ohio, named Lashonda Sharreice Childs was allegedly murdered by her ex-boyfriend. Just days before her death, according to local news media, Childs had written in a Facebook post that “domestic violence is real,” that it wasn’t “just in movies.” In December, Izabella “Izzy” Marie Helem was shot to death at the age of 4. Izzy’s 3-year-old brother had been playing with a gun he found in their grandmother’s Lebanon, Indiana, home and accidentally fired it in her direction.

While the rate of firearm-related homicides has declined since its peak in the 1980s, gun violence is the second most common cause of death among children in the U.S., according to one recent study, and its role in youth fatalities has expanded significantly in recent years.  Seldom do such fatalities result from high-profile campus massacres like that in Parkland, Florida, last February, when a 19-year-old former student slaughtered 17 people, including 14 students.

Except, let’s understand that study for a moment.

First, it looks like there’s a problem with the claim that guns are the second-leading cause of death for children. For example, there’s the fact that the United States government’s numbers seem to disagree with that claim.

However, let’s also consider that we have some of the best health care in the world and children, with proper health care, don’t die of things like disease and malnutrition like they do in many other places. If you remove all of the other causes, then yes, children are going to lose their lives to accidents and violence because there isn’t anything else to kill them.

Once again, though, the left-leaning media is failing to also note that cars claim more lives than guns. After all, what does that study they linked to list as the number one killer of children? That’s right. The car.

Frankly, guns will likely always be the second-most prevalent cause for children’s death in this country for the simple reason that there’s not likely anything else to unseat it from that position. In a lot of ways, that’s a good thing since it means we’re a prosperous nation.

The fact that there doesn’t seem to be any differentiation between homicides and suicides–something else we tend to see with anti-gunners–is also worth noting.

So no, there is no epidemic of violence against children. It just behooves some to pretend that there is one.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work to make kids even safer, but since it’s never really been about that to people like this, what can I say?