Pointshoot
Member
Just a friendly note to check your references on this. The American Academy of Pediatrics is fond of posting that firearm accidents are one of the primarily ways kids get hurt/injured, but if you read their reference material, you'll see how misleading these statistics really are.
For example, one study defines a "child" as anyone under 20 years of age. In another one I read a few years back, they defined African American "children" as anyone under 33 years of age. Digging a little deeper, you'll find that they're counting gang shootings as "children".
I work for a very large health insurance company. A few years ago I pulled Emergency Room utilization records from claims and looked at the E-codes in the diagnosis fields 1-9. E-codes tell you how accidents occur and are quite specific. I reviewed three years of data with 4.5 million members per year. Want to take a wild guess at how many firearm-related accidents I found? (Notes: I didn't count suicides as accidents and I classified newborns to 12 years of age as children, 13-17 as adolescents and 18+ as adults; I focused on 0-17 year olds).
I found one firearm accident. It occurred with a BB gun. That was it.
The way kids are really hurt, at least from what I saw in the claims, was falling down stairs, falling out of bed, etc. Firearms constituted one of the lowest, if not the lowest, categories of accidents for kids.
I'm going to try to replicate this study next year. I'm hoping that I'll be able to publish the results.
Thank you Doc !
Data, facts, and reason - - - rather than scare tactics. How unusual that is nowadays. I was already familiar with how the AAP came up with their 'statistics'. You presented them brilliantly and I'll have to copy your reply so I can pass it on to others. I hope your study will be available to the general public. I'd be very interested in reading it. Regards, - - -
Last edited: