Study Claims ‘Pediatric Homicides’ in Home Lower in Gun Control States

A few years ago, Cam wrote a piece about how gun control research is worthless. He wasn’t just saying it, either. This was based on a Reason interview with a Bloomberg columnist who pointed out how you can tell it’s garbage.

I think about that piece an awful lot. That’s especially true when I see some headline claiming some study found results that, just as usual, gun control works perfectly, even when it makes no sense for it to.

Take, for example, this story I came across about a so-called study that claims gun laws reduce pediatric in-home homicides.

The research, “Killed in Their Own Homes: The Rise of Pediatric Firearm In-Home Homicides and Association with State Firearm Laws,” examined data from the National Violent Death Reporting System and U.S. Census Bureau from 2005 to 2021, focusing on pediatric in-home firearm homicides. The pool was then narrowed to only include the 14 states with consistent data covering the entirety of the study.

Researchers found that during the years examined, there were 3,289 firearm-related homicides across 14 states, including 2,633 (80.0%) among teenagers ages 13–17 years and 656 (20.0%) among children ages 12 and younger. The numbers represent a rate of in-home firearm-related homicide ranging from 0.18 homicides per 100,000 children and adolescents in 2010 (the lowest rate observed in the 17-year timeframe) to 0.48 homicides per 100,000 in 2020. These homicides were often reported alongside incidents of child abuse and intimate partner violence.

Researchers examined which of the 14 states had the strongest gun control laws. They found that extreme risk protection order laws—often called red flag laws, in which family members or law enforcement can petition the court to remove firearms from the home of someone they believe to be at risk—were in place in five of the seven states with the lowest rates of in-home homicide. By contrast, only two of seven states with the highest rates of in-home homicide had such laws.

Now, it should be noted that there’s no link to this study. There’s also no mention of why the other 36 states’ data was “inconsistent” on a topic that one should be pretty straightforward in reporting.

The fact that they took just 14 states–just 28 percent of the states–is enough reason to be troubled all on its own.

However, look at the only policy mentioned: Red flag laws.

Why exactly would red flag laws lead to a reduction in in-home homicides for juveniles? I get that domestic violence was part of the equation in many of these awful tragedies, but red flag laws aren’t the same as restraining orders or domestic violence charges, both of which would take away someone’s right to own firearms.

Red flag laws aren’t really designed for that, so there’s really little reason to see any reason these laws would impact this particular niche of the homicide statistics.

This article also doesn’t even speculate as to why that might be the case. They simply present it as fact.

The thing is, this is still correlation versus causation, with a restricted sample size, without any mention of why that sample size had to be restricted, and no proposed mechanism for why a law that’s not meant to address this particular niche of crime is having an impact.

Everything about this stinks.

However, I expect to see this story up at the New York Times any minute now, because when has the media ever turned away from pushing the anti-gun narrative?

Editor’s Note: The mainstream media and academia continue to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment. 

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