Firearms become the leading cause of death for children and adolescents in the US for the first time.

By Aria Bendix -

Guns became the leading cause of death for children and teens in 2020, killing more people ages 1-19 in the United States than car accidents, drug overdoses, or cancer.

More than 4,300 people died from firearm-related injuries

that year, a 29% increase from 2019, according to research published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The paper analyzes decades of mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"In the last 40 years, and almost certainly before that, this is the first time that firearm injuries have outnumbered car accidents among children," said Jason Goldstick, co-author of the research and research associate professor. at the University of Michigan.

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Goldstick said that homicides, rather than suicides, made up the majority of gun deaths among children and teens in 2020. Gun murders, which disproportionately affect younger Americans,

"We continue to fail to protect our young people from a preventable cause of death," the researchers warn.

The number of auto-related deaths, which used to be the leading cause of death for children and teens, has dropped dramatically in the US over the past 20 years, likely due to improvements in vehicle safety.

About 3,900 people ages 1 to 19 died from car accidents in 2020.

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"Injury rates can be reduced without banning guns, just like car accident rates were reduced without banning cars," Goldstick said.

The research does not formulate specific policy solutions or funding priorities that could solve the problem.

The majority of children killed by firearms in 2020 were 14 or older,

Goldstick said, although the legal age to buy guns is 18.

"Kids don't buy guns, but that doesn't mean they don't have access," he said.

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A study published in February found that gun purchases increased during the coronavirus pandemic.

As a result, more than 5 million children under the age of 18 were exposed to firearms for the first time in their homes from January 2019 to April 2021.

Meanwhile, research from 2021 also reported an increase in firearm purchases after the pandemic began;

that correlated with higher rates of fatal and non-fatal firearm injuries both sustained and inflicted by young children.

For every fatal firearm injury, there are plenty of non-fatal firearm injuries."

Jason Goldstick, academic at the University of Michigan

The authors suggested that school closures and the resulting lack of adult supervision may have played a role in this trend.

Goldstick also stressed that the CDC's mortality data doesn't capture the full scale of gun violence among children and teens.

"For every fatal firearm injury, there are a lot of non-fatal firearm injuries. There's not really good data on non-fatal shootings in the United States," Goldstick said.