U.S. children and teens are more likely to die because of guns than car crashes, drug overdoses and cancer.

  • Hardeehar@lemm.ee
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    2 years ago

    I’m more interested right now in the obvious agenda.

    I’m not saying that child death’s aren’t up or that we shouldn’t do more to protect them but when citing data this way, I get the very strong feeling that it’s being made to look worse than it is on purpose. The majority are from suicides and murder fatalities are extreme in the 18-19 year old bracket.

    Why on earth does the metric include 18 and 19 year olds as children if not for making something look worse.

    The dictionary defines a child as a person between birth and puberty. Or not having attained the age of legal majority.

    It’s similar to when a 10 year old gets shot by the police, and then the news conference later has the police referring the 10 year old victim as “a young man” instead of “the child”. Does it not feel like they’re trying to achieve something?

    • wrath-sedan@kbin.social
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      2 years ago

      Why on earth does the metric include 18 and 19 year olds as children if not for making something look worse.

      Honestly, I tried pretty hard to find a good reason and other than the fact that the CDC groups data into <1, 1-4, 5-9, 10-14, and 15-19 age ranges there’s no real explanation. You could go up to 14, and then get individual year data up to 17/18 whatever the cutoff.

      I wouldn’t say it’s totally dishonest because it is baked into the data and the CDC considers them developmentally similar, but I think it also an issue NBC wasn’t too interested in fixing because it makes the article’s argument seem more convincing.