ABC’s “20/20” waded into the never-ending gun debate on Friday with a new special titled, “Young Guns.” While some pro-gun advocates, including TheBlaze TV’s Dana Loesch, are already panning the report, TheBlaze also took a closer look at the statistics cited by ABC and found a few noteworthy details.
In the report, ABC producers strategically place unloaded firearms in play areas and allow children to find them so their behavior can be observed. The objective of the experiment is seemingly to determine if parents’ children are safe at the homes of neighbors who own firearms.
While previewing her new special on Friday, Sawyer and ABC’s George Stephanopoulos claimed that “every hour a child is hospitalized because of gunshots” and “every other day a child [is] killed” by a gun.
A review of ABC’s statistics reveal that its numbers on “child” gun deaths include all “kids under age 18.” Citing the CDC, ABC reports that 1,337 people under age 18 died from gunshot wounds in 2010, which is actually trending down from 1,544 in 2000. When looking at ages 1-14, which the CDC actually classifies as children, there were 369 gun deaths in 2010 (including suicides, homicides and unintentional deaths).
Further, the network uses “kids and teens under age 20″ to calculate the number of “children” hospitalized from firearms injuries. ABC’s data source is based on a study done by Yale School of Medicine researchers rather than the CDC — and the numbers only include 2009. Some might also argue that people as old as 18 and 19-years-old aren’t children or kids. The report says 7,391 people under the age of 20 were hospitalized from gun-related injuries.
It is likely that a detailed breakdown of the Yale data would show the majority of gun injuries involved individuals older than the young children featured in the “20/20″ report. The vague presentation of the data on both deaths and injuries leaves a number of questions unanswered: Do the numbers include suspects shot by police officers? What about 18-year-olds who are shot while serving in the military? How many of the injuries and/or deaths are crime-related? Do they include suicides?
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