National trends in pediatric firearm and automobile fatalities - JPS article

Hi, I'm Ellen and Cisco at Cincinnati Children's, and here's an article you should know about. In this study, the authors wanted to look at national trends in pediatric firearm and automobile fatalities and see how state gun laws might affect those fatality rates. They looked at the CDC's Wonder database to look at data between 1999 and 2020. Then they used the Gifford's Law Center annual gun law scorecard between 2014 and 2020 to look at state gun law scores. As other recent studies have shown, in the last few years, the fatality rate for firearms has surpassed the fatality rate for automobiles in children. And they found that stronger gun laws were associated with decreased fatality rates. There was a 55% lower firearm fatality rate for the states with the strongest gun laws compared to those with the weakest gun laws. So, based on this data, it seems like there are things we can do including education, research, and advocacy to help reduce the firearm fatality rate in children. Let us know what you think.