Welcome to the Eric Erickson Show podcast, Our Three.

Greetings, welcome. It is Eric Erickson here. The phone number is 8779773-25 should you wish to be on the program.

I want to revisit something I talked about yesterday and add a little more depth to the depth I already gave you.

But first, I want to weave it into this story.

This is from the New York Times today.

Gun deaths rising sharply among children study fines.

Firearm injuries are a leading cause of death among young children and teenagers in the United States.

Let's get into this. Jovonia McDowell was making dinner one evening when she got a call saying her 14-year-old son,

Joanne, a gentle boy who loved animals, who was so generous that he gave a pair of shoes to a classmate who was being teased had been shot.

He was visiting a relative's home when another teenager pulled out a gun from a drawer,

where the firearm had been stashed under a t-shirt.

Joanne told him to put it away, but the other teenager said it wasn't loaded, not realizing that it was loaded.

He pulled the trigger. It hit Joanne in the chest. He was dead 17 minutes later. Children are generally medically healthy,

which is why accidental injuries pose the greatest threat to their lives. Car accidents

have long accounted for the bulk of injury-related fatalities among children,

but according to an analysis published on Thursday, the rate of firearm fatalities among

children under 18 increased 87%. From 2011 to 2021, the death rate attributable to car accidents

fell by almost half, leaving firearm injuries the top cause of accidental

deaths and children. The finding underscores additional data showing that firearm injuries

are now the leading cause of death among Americans under 20, after excluding deaths of infants

born prematurely. Some 2,590 children and teenagers under the age of 18 died of firearm injuries in 2021,

up from 1,311 in 2011.

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