Ohio Paper Falsely Claims ‘Gun Violence’ Leading Cause of Death for Kids in State. Here’s the Truth.

The best arguments that the gun control lobby have at their disposal are emotional in nature, and nothing tugs on the heartstrings more than the deaths of innocent children. The loss of those young lives are undeniably tragic, but they shouldn’t be politicized. And when the media deploy outright falsehoods to push for more gun laws, they need to be called out. 

The Cleveland Plain Dealer has published an article claiming that “gun violence” is the leading cause of death for children in Ohio, based on a new report by Children’s Defense Fund-Ohio. The problem is that the report itself doesn’t make that claim. It does say that “gun violence” in all its forms is one of the leading causes of death for children, a group the CDF-Ohio defines as those between the ages of 1 and 19. 

18 and 19-year olds are, of course, legal adults, but lumping them in with actual children while excluding kids under the age of one does dramatically inflate the number of “gun violence” deaths among children. Oddly, though, the report never offers any specific numbers to back up its claims. 

I decided to do a little fact-checking, and what I found completely debunks the Plain Dealer’s headline. According to the Ohio Department of Health, every county in the state conducts a review of every child fatality, and the data is compiled in an annual report. The most recent data is from 2023, which is also the latest year cited in CDF-Ohio’s report. 

According to the Ohio Department of Health, children under the age of one comprised 62% of child fatalities in the state; a group that is entirely excluded from CDF-Ohio’s report. That exclusion dramatically skewed the CDF’s statistics. 

How dramatically? Well, the Ohio Department of Health reports that between 2018 and 2022, 64% of child deaths in the state were due to natural causes. That is, by far, the leading cause of death. Not homicide. Not suicide. Not accidents involving firearms. 

Among all children from birth to age 17, firearms were involved in just 6% of all childhood fatalities between 2018 and 2022; approximately 315 of the 5,482 childhood deaths in the state over those five years. Suicide accounted for 44% of those deaths, homicide accounted for 43%, and accidents accounted for 13%. 

The Ohio Department of Health also broke down the manner of death for the 1,689 child deaths between 2018 and 2022 that were the result of external injuries. It’s reporting shows 64% of those deaths were accidental in nature, with homicide accounting for 16% and suicide accounting for 17% of those deaths. The leading cause of accidental death wasn’t gun related. It was asphyxiation, which accounted for 42% of accidental fatalities among those 17 and younger. Just 4% of those deaths were the result of “weapons/bodily force”; a category that does not just include accidents involving firearms. 

The CDF-Ohio report focusing on “gun violence” is full of suggestions that are, as you might have guessed, heavily dependent on creating new gun control laws: gun storage mandates, universal background checks, establishing a statewide Office of Gun Violence Prevention, and “reimagining public safety” by “investing sustainably in community-based violence interventions.”

The best thing the state of Ohio could do to protect the lives of children in the state would be to heavily invest in parental education to prevent asphyxiation and drowning deaths, not pass more gun control laws that are only enforceable after the fact. If we want to reduce child homicides, we need to ensure consequences for illegal gun possession among teens and young adults. If we want to reduce child suicides, the state needs to address the fact that the vast majority of counties have a severe shortage of mental health professionals who can work with kids. 

There were 5,482 childhood deaths in Ohio between 2018 and 2022. Gun-involved suicides and homicides comprised 6% of those deaths. Should that number be lower? Of course. But that doesn’t change the fact that the Cleveland Plain Dealer is just wrong to assert that “gun violence” is the leading cause of death for kids in Ohio, and that its reporters shouldn’t have just taken the data provided by CDF-Ohio at face value. 

Editor’s Note: We don’t shy away from the truth here at Bearing Arms. We try to shine a light on it instead. 

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