A 2010 Supreme Court ruling that weakened local gun laws led to an estimated 7,400 additional gun-related deaths among children and adolescents, primarily due to homicides and suicides rather than accidents.
United States: After the US Supreme Court took away the power of local governments to set gun ownership rules in 2010, children and adolescents experienced a sharp increase in gun-related deaths across more lenient states, a study finds.
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After the law was set, deaths caused by firearms did not increase in those states that had strict laws, the team stated.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that guns are the main reason for death in the United States for those between the ages of 1 and 17.
Looser Gun Laws, More Dead Children: What the New Data Reveals
— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) June 9, 2025
🚨In this video, we review how looser gun laws after a 2010 Supreme Court ruling led to thousands more child gun deaths—states with strict laws had 2.5x less gun violence in general. https://t.co/cLR1yENcDl pic.twitter.com/Wd0zh4S0fV
The main author, Dr. Jeremy Faust, who works in the emergency room at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said he was surprised that she said that most of the deaths in their study were due to homicide or suicide, the New York Times reported.
“It’s surprising how few of these are accidents,” as per Dr. Faust said.
“I always thought that a lot of pediatric mortality from guns is that somebody got into the wrong place, and I still think safe storage is important, but it’s mostly homicides and suicides,” as the expert reported.
In its findings published on Monday, the study explored data from the 13 years after the Supreme Court decided that member states’ Second Amendment rights are recognized in the Court’s McDonough ruling.
The action prevented state and local governments from putting strong controls on firearm regulations.
The team grouped states into the categories of most permissive, permissive, and strict according to their firearm rules.
They looked at data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention covering the years 1999 to 2010 and saw how these numbers changed following the ruling of the Supreme Court in 2010, the New York Times reported.
Statistics at a national level showed that, after the ruling, the number of children and teenagers who died from firearms was almost 7,400 higher than the forecast, leaving a total of nearly 23,000 deaths.