On February 15, 2024, the day after the Kansas City Chiefs’ parade shooting, Vice President Kamala Harris reiterated the false claim that gun violence is the No. 1 killer of children.
Harris used a post to X to say, “Gun violence is the number one cause of death for children of America—not some form of illness or car accidents.”
She made this same claim in July 2023, and Breitbart News fact-checked the claim, noting numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show firearm-related deaths for children aged 0-17 were 2,281 in 2020, while the number of motor vehicle deaths for the same ages was 2,503.
Moreover, according to CDC numbers, children are are 27 times more likely to die in an accidental car death than in an accidental gun death, and unintentional suffocation deaths are 10 times higher among children than accidental gun deaths.
Nevertheless, Harris made the claim again the day after the Chiefs shooting and “call[ed] on Congress and state legislators to have the courage to act by passing commonsense gun safety legislation.”
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 pro-staffer for Pulsar Night Vision. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2010 and 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
