A Note About Data Sources The data used in this report to describe gun deaths in U.S. children and teens are from death certificate data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. Every death is included in the vital statistics system. Another source of data for some gun deaths is law enforcement reports of murders. There is a national system that collects these data—the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) system, but this system is not complete. Not all law enforcement agencies participate in this system, and coverage varies from year to year. Further, the UCR system covers only homicide deaths. A comparison of this system with the vital statistics system shows that UCR includes between 75 and 80 percent of the firearm homicides of children and teens. For this reason we do not use FBI UCR data to describe child gun deaths. Nonfatal injury data are from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS). These data are collected by the Consumer Product Safety Commission and processed by the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The data are collected from a sample of emergency rooms representative of the nation as a whole. National estimates are extrapolated from the data collected from this sample. No state-level data are available through this system. Data for other high-income nations were collected through the World Health Organization (WHO) European Mortality Database, which aggregates vital statistics data from countries around the world. Data for Canada was collected separately through Canada’s vital statistics system. All gun death and injury data in this report exclude gun deaths resulting from legal (police and corrections) intervention. When possible, data by race/ethnicity separate out children and teens of Hispanic origin regardless of race from children and teens of other races.
Protect Children, Not Guns 2013
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