Rosen: Surgeon General misleads on gun violence Complete Colorado
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(You can listen to this column, read by the author, here.)
In a July speech advocating for more stringent gun control, President Biden claimed that “More children are killed by a bullet than any other cause of death.” That’s surely an alarming and tragic statistic but a very misleading one. The use of the word “children” is deceptive, emotionally bringing to mind infants, toddlers and kindergartners. Legally, a “child” can be as old as 17, or even 20 in some states, including those with felony convictions and gangbangers in inner cities, like Chicago. According to a study by the Centers for Disease Control, “In 2022, Black children and teens were 20 times as likely to die from firearm homicides compared to their white counterparts.” And the great majority of those deaths are black on black shootings by teenage gangsters, not little kids. And statistically, the kinds of diseases that fatally afflict the elderly in great numbers are rare among youngsters, skewing the causes of death toward guns.