Vice President Kamala Harris spoke Friday to volunteers of the Mike Bloomberg-affiliated Everytown for Gun Safety and claimed that gun violence is a “disease” that requires the passage of more gun control.
Harris began her comments by falsely claiming that “gun violence is the leading cause of death of the children of America.”
She made this same claim in mid-July, at which time Breitbart News did a fact check and explained that the claim was false. Numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that firearm-related deaths for children aged 0-17 totaled 2,281 in 2020, while the number of motor vehicle deaths for the same ages was 2,503.
Additionally, on July 13, 2023, Breitbart News pointed to CDC numbers that showed accidental suffocation deaths are ten times higher among children than accidental gun deaths.
But Harris claimed gun violence to be the leading cause of death for children, then added, “It’s the number one cause of death, not some disease, although this is a form of a disease.”
Harris went on to push for red flag laws, an “assault weapons” ban, and universal background checks, all three of which are already failing to stop shootings in California.
California has every gun control that the Democrats are pushing at the federal level, yet Breitbart News noted an FBI report on “Active Shooter Incidents” shows that California was the number one state for such incidents in 2021.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and a Turning Point USA Ambassador. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2010, a speaker at the 2023 Western Conservative Summit, and he holds a Ph.D. in Military History, with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at
