Thread by @usacsmret

Eric Swalwell Claims Kids Live In A Bullet-Riddled Dystopia. The Opposite Is True thefederalist.com/2019/04/09/kid…

“First, we must address the single greatest threat to young Americans’ lives: gun violence,” Swalwell explained in an essay laying out the reasons for his vanity presidential run. “It is astonishing and unacceptable that we have let school massacres become part of daily life.”

In the real world, guns aren’t even in the vicinity of being the “single greatest threat” in the lives of young people. And school massacres are a rare event that the vast majority of American children will, luckily, never experience

Kids, in fact, are safer and healthier in contemporary America than they’ve ever been in our history. Almost all the data offered by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other studies regarding the lives of children is trending in a positive direction.

Putting shootings in context isn’t the same as dismissing them. It’s undeniable that horrifying mass shootings have a bigger impression on the American psyche than the random firearm crimes that actually drive the homicide rate.

There’s an inherent evil in the act of a mass shooting that is incomprehensible for any normal person to process. That’s no excuse for the cynical exploitation of these events.

It is difficult to debate the problem in good faith, mostly because people keep changing the definition of “mass shooting” to serve their political bias. But even using the most liberal definition of the phrase, mass shootings are “one of the rarest mortality risks imaginable,”

Cato’s Alan Reynolds has pointed out.
From 1982 to early 2018, mass shootings accounted for around 23 deaths per year. Not kids; all deaths. An American has a far higher chance of drowning in a swimming pool (3,500 per year) or perishing on a bike (over 700)

To put it in perspective: right now, there are around 42 million young people between the ages of 10 and 19 in the country.

If you want to talk about a greatest threat to American mortality, you should be talking about the 250,000 people—or 10 percent of all deaths—in the United States that can likely be attributed to medical mistakes, according to a recent Johns Hopkins study.

If kids should be petrified about anything, it’s getting into a car with parents who are taking them to a hospital for routine surgery. If parents should be scared of anything, it’s the mental health of their kids. Child suicide rates have been slightly rising

Yet more young people from the ages of 15-24 (the CDC has this age group as a data set, which doesn’t really tell the full story because deaths skew towards the young adults rather than the teens) die from “unintentional poisoning”—or drug overdoses—than gun homicides or suicides

Now, a lot of people like to conflate suicide deaths with gun homicides for political purposes. There have been a number of efforts trying to convince you that the suicide rate, not particularly high in the United States, is a product of gun culture.

If guns were the driving factor, why did firearm-related suicides and homicides precipitously drop from the 1990s to the mid-2010s, exactly when gun ownership exploded?