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, thou

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).