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Note that the category of "children" in this headline appears to include some adults (people age 18 or 19). And one suspects that many (most?) of the "gun deat

Note that the category of "children" in this headline appears to include some adults (people age 18 or 19). And one suspects that many (most?) of the "gun deaths" in this category were of such adults. Also note that "leading cause" is a meaningless phrase. Depending on how finely you split the other causes, anything could be the "leading cause of death". For example, it seems that in the article "car crashes" are a separate category. If we instead had an "accidental death" category (car crashes, plus drownings, plus accidental drug overdoses, etc.) I suspect that that "accidental death" would be the leading cause.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> Depending on how finely you split the other causes, anything could be the "leading cause of death". In my country there are usually zero gun deaths among children (0-17) (usually here means that they do exist, but are so rare that I think the last one was in 2009) No matter how you fine tune your stats, gun deaths will never be a leading cause for them, while In 2017, nine children and teens were killed with guns each day in America — one every 2 hours and 34 minutes ...
- radford-neal 4y ago
  Well, yes, you're right. You can't make a category with a count of zero be the leading cause this way. I suspect you're living in a fairly small country, though. More fundamentally, however, we don't really care how many children die of gunshot wounds. Other mechanisms of death are just as worrying. In particular, most gunshot deaths are suicides (for the general population, not sure about children 0-17 in the US). If guns are unavailable, at least many of these children will find some other way to commit suicide. Unless you're in a really small country, I doubt that there have been zero suicides of children 0-17 in recent years. The graph in the paper linked from the article seems rather uninformative, actually. It shows lines for "Firearm-related injury" and for "Motor vehicle crash", both of which are a combination of accidents, suicides, and homicides. Surely to make any useful conclusions you have to look at what these underlying causes were (of which there is some mention in the paper, but not enough to really see what's happening).
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    > I suspect you're living in a fairly small country, though if you consider Italy a fairy small country, yes, I am living in a fairy small country.
    - radford-neal 4y ago
      OK. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_suicide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_suicide (which seems a bit out of date), the youth suicide rate in the US (in 2000) was 8.0 per 100,000, while in Italy (in 2000) it was 2.7 per 100,000. So indeed you are (or were) doing better. But only by a factor of three. There aren't going to be any zeros in the tables. Are you sure that your claim of no gun death of a person under 18 since 2009 is actually true? Could it instead be that there was no gun homicide of a person under 18 since 2009?

peoplefromibiza 4y ago

> Depending on how finely you split the other causes, anything could be the "leading cause of death". In my country there are usually zero gun deaths among children (0-17) (usually here means that they do exist, but are so rare that I think the last one was in 2009) No matter how you fine tune your stats, gun deaths will never be a leading cause for them, while In 2017, nine children and teens were killed with guns each day in America — one every 2 hours and 34 minutes ...

radford-neal 4y ago
Well, yes, you're right. You can't make a category with a count of zero be the leading cause this way. I suspect you're living in a fairly small country, though. More fundamentally, however, we don't really care how many children die of gunshot wounds. Other mechanisms of death are just as worrying. In particular, most gunshot deaths are suicides (for the general population, not sure about children 0-17 in the US). If guns are unavailable, at least many of these children will find some other way to commit suicide. Unless you're in a really small country, I doubt that there have been zero suicides of children 0-17 in recent years. The graph in the paper linked from the article seems rather uninformative, actually. It shows lines for "Firearm-related injury" and for "Motor vehicle crash", both of which are a combination of accidents, suicides, and homicides. Surely to make any useful conclusions you have to look at what these underlying causes were (of which there is some mention in the paper, but not enough to really see what's happening).
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > I suspect you're living in a fairly small country, though if you consider Italy a fairy small country, yes, I am living in a fairy small country.
  - radford-neal 4y ago
    OK. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_suicide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_suicide (which seems a bit out of date), the youth suicide rate in the US (in 2000) was 8.0 per 100,000, while in Italy (in 2000) it was 2.7 per 100,000. So indeed you are (or were) doing better. But only by a factor of three. There aren't going to be any zeros in the tables. Are you sure that your claim of no gun death of a person under 18 since 2009 is actually true? Could it instead be that there was no gun homicide of a person under 18 since 2009?