For a couple of years now, we've been inundated with claims that so-called gun violence is so bad that it's now the leading cause of death among children. This was particularly egregious because the Left never acknowledged they were pushing an agenda that explicitly included legal adults — 18- and 19-year-olds are adults, after all — in their figures.
They started playing with the numbers in various ways, but the claim has never changed.
However, we all know it's BS. Moreover, we have evidence that it's BS.
The gun-control lobby has spent years telling Americans that firearms are the leading cause of death among children. A new analysis from the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s own mortality data, challenges that claim and exposes the statistical choices behind one of the anti-gun movement’s most frequently repeated talking points.
According to provisional 2025 data from the CDC WONDER mortality database, there were 2,099 firearm-related deaths among Americans ages 1 through 17. During the same period, 4,140 children in that age group died from unintentional injuries, including 97 accidental firearm deaths. Transport accidents alone accounted for 2,223 deaths, while motor-vehicle accidents accounted for 2,099, exactly matching the firearm total.
The findings come from an October 2026 SAF fact sheet prepared by Kostas Moros, the organization’s Director of Legal Research and Education. The report examines how gun-control organizations use selective age ranges, narrowly defined accident categories, and combined firearm death statistics to create a misleading impression about childhood mortality.
The analysis was prompted by an October 15 social media post from Giffords, the gun-control organization founded by former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
“Guns are the leading cause of death for kids in America.”
The CDC’s official leading-cause-of-death rankings tell a different story.
Perhaps no claim has been as frequently repeated by the gun control side in recent years than "guns are the leading cause of death for kids." Our new Fact Sheet examines this claim in detail using the CDC's provisional data for 2025, which is the most recent available. The takeaway: while gun-related causes temporarily passed traffic-related causes during the crime surge years, you can only claim guns were the leading cause of death among minors if you: 1. Ignore that accidents as a combined category have always been a far greater cause of death for that age cohort; and 2. simultaneously combine all gun-related deaths regardless of intent (suicides, homicides, and accidents).
— SAF (@2AFDN) October 20, 2026
The important part here is, of course, how they cook the books. Any so-called gun death is treated as the same, but accidents were separated out so as to reduce the overall impact.
See, this is an example of how dishonest the anti-gunners actually are. They're more than willing to play games with the numbers in order to make their point. That's not what you do if you're convinced you're correct.
As it is, it's not difficult to get everyone to agree the only acceptable number is zero, so why manipulate the data to make the problem seem worse? Because the anti-gun agenda requires people to be scared. It requires fear. What's worse isn't just that they know they have to scare people, but that they'll feel self-righteous about it. They'll be convinced they're doing good things because their delusions won't let them look at the data and recognize that if they're having to play games with it, maybe they've overestimated the problem.
If kids die more often by accident than gunfire, then it makes sense to put more of our effort and energy into preventing fatal accidents. That's no good for the gun-grabbers, who don't actually seem to care all that much about kids so much as they care about using kids to justify their anti-gun agenda.
It's pathetic, at best. It's vile at its worst, and I'm not exactly feeling my normal optimism here.