Children's Defense Fund pushes gun-control agenda

According to this article by Howard Nemerov, an organization called the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) claims increasing more gun-control will save lives:

The Children’s Defense Fund claims increasing gun control will save children’s lives:

We need to ensure that those we elect to public office enact legislation that will really protect children by limiting the number of guns in our communities, controlling who can obtain firearms and the conditions of their use.[4]

Another gambit by anti-gun organizations is to include older teens and adults in their calculations, in order to produce at a scarier number, implying that eight children a day die because “gun lovers” only care about “their rights.”

Oxford English Dictionary defines the word “childhood” as: “the time from birth to puberty.”[5] Oxford defines “puberty” as: “The period during which adolescents reach sexual maturity and become capable of reproduction…”[6] In terms of age, there seems to be general agreement that this ability to procreate occurs by the age of 15.[7]

In 2005, the total firearms death rate for CDF’s “children and teens” was 3.70. However, the rate for those age 18-19 was 18.56, and the rate for those age 15-17 was 8.50. For true children (age 0-14) the rate was 1.31; 404 children were killed by firearms in 2005 for all intents, an average of slightly over one per day.[8]

The U.S. Health and Human Services estimates that in 2005, 1,460 children died as a result of abuse and neglect (4 each day, 1.96 per 100,000 population); 76.6% of that total was younger than four years old. Infant boys (younger than 1 year) had the highest fatality rate at 17.3, followed by infant girls at 14.5; 79.4% of the perpetrators were parents.[9] CDF’s Programs page includes no child abuse/neglect initiative, even though over three times as many children were killed by abuse/neglect than by firearms.[10]

Furthermore, there were 230 child firearm homicides in 2005, but there were 1,022 total child homicides. This means that 77.5% of all child homicides occurred without using a gun. Meanwhile, the victims of 87.1% of all drowning homicides, 88.1% of all poisoning homicides, and 66.7% of all suffocation homicides were children––physically less able to fend off an attacker. The idea that someone needs a gun to kill a child is naïve.
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The problem with organizations that represent only one side of an issue is that their intentional lack of context creates misleading distortions. When discussing the emotionally intense subject of child fatalities, such distortions can lead to promoting policies which ‘feel good’ but produce negative consequences.

In the Supreme Court case of District of Columbia v. Heller, CDF signed onto an amicus brief in support of the D.C. gun ban.[13] The CDC reports that for the years of 1999-2005, the overall homicide death rate for children was 1.76, while the rate in D.C. rated the highest of any self-governing entity at 5.79. For the years 1994-1998, the national children’s homicide rate was 2.14, but D.C. again beat all states at 8.76.[14]
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Crime costs society. Guns in the hands of law-abiding people stop crime. Rates of child firearms homicide, suicide, and accidental death are falling faster than the national rates. Laws touted as being “for the children” today risk costing more children’s lives tomorrow. Children’s Defense Fund would save more children by skipping the social engineering and returning to their core mission of promoting programs which serve them.

Howard provides lots of statistics (with source citations) to debunk the CDF's arguments. So if you're into "stat-porn", you'll probably enjoy the article. :)