Bloomberg Group's Count of Accidental Gun Deaths 60% Higher Than CDC's

Michael Bloomberg’s gun control group Everytown For Gun Safety claims 100 children were accidentally shot and killed in the 12 months after Adam Lanza’s heinous crime at Sandy Hook Elementary, but Centers for Disease Control (CDC) figures disagree.

Moreover, Everytown for Gun Safety says the children who are at greatest risk of accidental firearm death “are toddlers, age two to four” and “older children, age twelve to fourteen.” As Breitbart News reported on January 31, CDC numbers show that far more children under the age of ten are killed in fire or water-related incidents than are killed in accidental gun-related deaths.

For example, looking at CDC figures for 2010, the number of children ten and under unintentionally killed in fire-related deaths was over seven times higher than the number killed in unintentional gun-related deaths, and the number of children ten and under unintentionally killed in drowning deaths was sixteen times higher.

So how did Everytown For Gun Safety elevate the numbers to such a degree in their study? By their own admittance they relied on media reports – or “publicly reported gun deaths” – rather than official data.

Crime Prevention Research Center’s John Lott explains why the use of media reports instead of CDC numbers is not a viable research method:

Using news media stories to identify accidental gun deaths, as Bloomberg’s [Everytown For Gun Safety] has done, is notoriously unreliable because the stories are usually written before all the investigation is completed and the medical examiner report has been done.

He went on to say the CDC is far more thorough in that they not only list accidental gun deaths but provide an “evaluation of how to classify” a gun death as accidental in the first place.

The Everytown For Gun Safety study exaggerating the number of accidental deaths comes on the heels of the group’s earlier study claiming “74 school shootings” since Sandy Hook. As Breitbart News reported on June 12, some of the “74 school shootings” were stabbings and incidents without injuries or fatalities.

Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.