Accidental Gunshot Deaths of Children

A post by Joe Huffman led me to the CDC's latest statistical reference of accidental deaths of children in 2006. (That's the latest year for which complete data are available.) Here's a distillation of the accidental deaths in 2006, by cause, of children under the age of fifteen:

Of the nine causes of accidental death listed by the CDC, accidental discharge of firearms was ninth in total deaths of children fifteen and younger. Accidental discharge of firearms accounted for 54 deaths of children under the age of 15 years, out of a total accidental death toll in that age range of 5,015. Thus, accidental discharge of firearms was the cause of just 1.08% of all accidental deaths of children under the age of fifteen in 2006.

Those 54 deaths were tragedies - there is no other word for it – but so were the other 4,961 accidental deaths of young children in 2006.

These figures were taken from the CDC's National Vital Statistics Report – “Deaths: Final Data For 2006”, page 35, Table 10, http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr57/nvsr57_14.pdf