20 Children per day shot (Pediatrics Journel)....

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mehavey

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> About 20 children per day in the United States are injured by firearms
> seriously enough to require hospitalization, and more than 6% of these
> children die from their injuries, according to a study by Yale School of
> Medicine researchers and their colleagues published in the Jan. 27 online
> issue of Pediatrics.
http://news.yale.edu/2014/01/27/aft...ons-firearm-injuries-prevalent-among-children

I am stunned by what this study is reporting.

I was unable to find it in the current issue of PEDIATRICS to dig through the data, so does anyone have a cite to the actual article?
 
I have not searched for the exact data...
However I "think" that included in that 20, is 17 year old gang members
There is no separation of accidental discharge, and so
 
The last time a similar study showed up it did contain "children" up to 20 years old all gang and drug related shootings.
 
Kev is right. That number also includes under 21 "youths" who are shot by police in the commission of a crime, killed in self defense, and who committed suicide.

I wouldn't consider someone my age shot robbing a liquor store a "child victim of gun violence". Their same epidemiology would list the shooters at Columbine and Sandy Hook as victims.
 
seems like a teen age criminal street gang problem, not a firearms problem; considering that there were fewer shooting when guns were more easily obtained decades ago, yet there were fewer teen age criminal street gangs.
 
Same old page, same old book

A study that includes 18,19 and 20 year old ADULTS as Children.
Not even slightly dishonest.
 
It does seem like organized medical groups tend to be anti-gun.

The article does say they defined "children" as “under 20” so yeah, the 19 year old gang-bangers would be included.

I don’t understand the following though.
Leventhal and his team found that the most common types of firearm injuries included open wounds (52%); fractures (50%); and internal injuries of the thorax, abdomen or pelvis (34%).Traumatic brain injuries occurred most often in children younger than age 5.
Click to expand...

Only 52% of firearm injuries result in open wounds? I’d think it would be very close to 100%.

And why the traumatic brain injuries in children younger than age 5. Do children under age 5 have a propensity for being shot in the head? Perhaps being shot anywhere leads to blood loss and in little kids the blood loss leads to brain injury? Shrug. I can assume that but the article should have explained it better.

Count me in as being interested if anyone finds the complete study.
 
More emotional arguments rather than reason and logic.

20 children INJURED per day! What does that tell you? Absent other facts, nothing at all.

Look at the CDC's report on childhood mortality. Firearms deaths are such a small percentage that they're not even listed separately, they're simply included in "Other" and even being included in every "other" cause, they amount to 0.9 per 100,000 of a total of 15.1 per 100,000. Even if firearms were the ONLY cause of "other", they would amount to 5.9% of fatal injuries. The only causes that are statistically smaller are bicycles and falling.
 
Brian, it doesn't need to tell you anything. It merely needs to wave the bloody shirt. I'm still
waiting to find the original/whole paper and so break it down by age group, circumstance, etc,
but I'm not fooling myself. "Save the Children" written in blood on that shirt is all that's needed.

If as noted by Kev above, the data include "children" up to/including 19 year olds, those above
~age 12-13 are likely not victim to a "safety" problem, but rather but one of their own making.

However... once this is all effectively labled "a health & safety issue," this is a whole new game
for the regulators.
 
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The original article appears in the February issue of Pediatrics, which apparently isn't up yet - clicking on the "Current Issue" link at the AAP site only brings up the January issue.

I was, however, able to find this on-line press release, which does indicate that the study defined "children" (clarified to "children and adolescents" in the body of the text) as being individuals younger than age 20 at the time of admission to the hospital. And previous posters are absolutely correct - that definition would include individuals that most of us wouldn't think of as children.

Remains to be seen if that mischaracterization originates with the authors of the study or whoever prepared the press release.
 
You guys are absolutely correct on the slanted reporting of "child" as anyone under 20. In fact, some DOJ statistics on violence call anyone under 25 a child.

The study also trots out the chestnut that "75% of the almost 400 hospitalizations were due to unintentional or accidental injuries." That sounds frightening, but one of the most frequent defenses offered after a shooting is, "it just went off" or "I didn't mean to pull the trigger."

This is why many suicides are reported as accidents. Joe's wife left him, he lost his job, and that night, he had a cleaning accident.

Since this is an article for a trade publication that's been deluged with anti-gun propaganda for decades, I don't see it making much of a difference either way.
 
DaleA said:
It does seem like organized medical groups tend to be anti-gun.

The article does say they defined "children" as “under 20” so yeah, the 19 year old gang-bangers would be included.

I don’t understand the following though.


Only 52% of firearm injuries result in open wounds? I’d think it would be very close to 100%.

And why the traumatic brain injuries in children younger than age 5. Do children under age 5 have a propensity for being shot in the head? Perhaps being shot anywhere leads to blood loss and in little kids the blood loss leads to brain injury? Shrug. I can assume that but the article should have explained it better.

Count me in as being interested if anyone finds the complete study.
Click to expand...

Very young children have trouble holding handguns properly. They often end up holding the grip with the muzzle pointed toward their face, and then squeeze the trigger with their thumbs. Or so I've heard.

And I hate to sound callous, but in a nation of over 300 million people, 20 "kids" (however it's defined) is a lot lower than I would have expected.
 
Doh! - I just realized that it's possible to access the entire original article by following the link provided in the press release that I cited above. Or you can access it directly here.
 
I wonder how many children are injured each day in vehicle accidents? I wonder if this number has been reported in the Pediatric Journal?
 
Wow. What a disingenuous study: They include "children" up to 20 years old!? Hell, when I was 20 I had been in the Marine Corps for three years and was training for my second deployment. And how many of these are gang-related? Their age range includes part of the group most likely to be involved in gang violence.

It doesn't end: They use statistics that are vastly inflated by suicides and gang-on-gang violence, combined with the imagery of mass-shootings (which, while tragic, are extraordinarily rare in a statistical sense), to try to further criminalize lawful gun ownership.
 
Wow. What a disingenuous study: They include "children" up to 20 years old!? Hell, when I was 20 I had been in the Marine Corps for three years and was training for my second deployment. And how many of these are gang-related? Their age range includes part of the group most likely to be involved in gang violence.
Click to expand...

20 y.o. "Children"?

George Washington was left home @ age 16 to work as a surveyor......

..... add to this the number of actual children hit by stray bullets from gang related shootings (happens with such boring regularity in my nearest metro area that it only makes news if the child is killed) .....

To hear these people tell it, if we'd only further restrict gun ownership, then all these poor little tykes would stop accidentally shooting themselves with leagally purchased guns that are just running aound loose everywhere .....
 
Just out of curiosity what is the standard definition of “children” used by the medical profession? Is it 0 – 20 years old?
 
I've been spending some time looking over the full text of the article and also checking some of their citations, and in fairness to the authors, they're really pretty consistent in referring to "children and adolescents" not "children" - that's coming from the press release, which I'm sure the authors didn't write and likely didn't even get a chance to see, and from the media generally. They're also pretty up front about showing that the vast majority of these hospitalizations, 84% in fact, are within the 15 to 19 age group. Still, would have been better if they'd used a more restrictive definition of "children" - they might have anticipated how inflammatory this sort of work can be and how the article would be spun in the press.
 
I don’t understand the following though.

Quote:
Leventhal and his team found that the most common types of firearm injuries included open wounds (52%); fractures (50%); and internal injuries of the thorax, abdomen or pelvis (34%).Traumatic brain injuries occurred most often in children younger than age 5.

Only 52% of firearm injuries result in open wounds? I’d think it would be very close to 100%.
Click to expand...

Considering the study includes air guns, I have to wonder if some of the injuries aren't the result of paint ball guns!
It's somewhat obvious that not all the injuries come from being shot.
Some could even be from such benign sources as a kid getting his first taste of a 12 ga. recoil and ending up with a badly bruised shoulder.

On the whole, the "study" is pseudo-science and serves no purpose other than being a "publication".

If you've ever spent more than 30 seconds in the company of university professors, you'll understand the significance of the term "published".
 
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