Americans shrug off the leading cause of childhood deaths

If we were a primitive society, anthropologists would wonder what terrible deities we’re trying to appease by the ritual sacrifice of so many children.

They’d think how backward, these Americans, so cowed by the gun gods that they relinquished the lives of 4,368 youngsters (ages 1 to 19) to firearms in 2020, according to a research letter published in the New England Journal of Medicines. That means gun violence has now supplanted motor vehicle accidents as the leading cause of childhood fatalities.

Traffic accidents had long been the No 1 killer of American kids, but cars have been getting steadily safer while guns have become more lethal and so numerous that civilian-owned firearms now outnumber people.

The preventable deaths of so many kids has done nothing to sway zealots opposed to gun control. (Don’t mistake the tepid “compromise” eked out by a few moderates in the U.S. Senate this past week as serious gun control.)

There was a fleeting moment when the massacre of 19 fourth graders and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24 seemed to change attitudes. Apparently not.

Of course, most of the kids killed by firearms in the U.S. die in less noticed circumstances. The shooting death of 15-year-old Achilles Lopez in the living room of his Pembroke Pines home last weekend was more typical. Police reported that a member of his household, “due to negligence and mishandling,” accidently shot the high school soccer star.

A 2016 collaborative investigation by the Associated Press and USA Today found that a kid dies from an accidental shooting every other day in the United States. Which means the U.S. loses more children and teens to accidental shootings than other advanced nations lose to intentional gun homicides — adults and children combined.

The United Kingdom’s Office for National Assistance, for example, reported 30 firearm homicides in England and Wales during all of 2020. The English must worship a more benevolent deity than the NRA.

Toddlers who happen upon unsecured pistols make up another peculiarly American category of killers. The AP-USA investigation of child shootings found “deaths and injuries spike for children under 5,” with 3-yearolds both the most common “shooters and victims.”

Which means a person is statistically more likely to be shot dead by a toddler in the U.S. than by a homicidal adult in Japan.

Careless gun owners with small children about have created too many variations of the May 26 tragedy in Orange County, when a 2-year-old discovered a paper bag containing his father’s pistol. The tiny child killed his father, who had been engrossed in a video game, with a shot to the head.

In April, a 3-year-old in Jacksonville was killed while playing with his father’s pistol. In January, the Bay County Sheriff ’s Office reported that a 4-year-old discovered an unsecured pistol and killed his 2-year-old sibling.

Last year in Altamonte Springs, another toddler found an unsecured pistol and shot his 21-year-old mother, to the horror of her co-workers, who had joined her on a work-related Zoom meeting.

Not that this epidemic of children shooting themselves or others is unique to Florida. The AP-USA Today investigation found between

2014 and 2016, the U.S. lost 152 children under

12 to either self-inflicted gunshots or a round fired by another child.

You can guess why. American suffers an epidemic of negligent gun owners. A 2018 study published in the Journal of Urban Health estimated that 4.6 million children live in homes with unsecured guns.

Meanwhile, a Journal of the American Medical Association study found that although 70% of gun-owning parents reported that their firearms were hidden away from children, more than a third of their kids told researchers they could access those very weapons in less than five minutes.

Tougher gun storage laws would help. So would be requirements for so-called “smart guns” — weapons with personalized biometric locking devices that can only be fired by individual gun owners.

But when a few dealers tried marketing smart guns in 2014, the reaction from gun rights absolutists was so harsh, biometric firearms were quickly removed from gun shops.

American consumers and the National Traffic Safety Administration reacted to the former leading killer of American children with considerably less trepidation. Over the years, automobile manufacturers were required to install seat belts, air bags, safety glass and reinforced passenger cabins, which explains why America’s fatality-per-driven-mile rate has been reduced by 75% since

1969.

Apparently, the car gods require fewer sacrificial deaths than the almighty NRA.