And more toddlers and children get killed in the US than anywhere else in the developed world:
Quote:Carter was among the last children shot that day, a 24-hour stretch of gun violence that, according to police reports, left girls and boys from one coast to the other maimed or dead. About 1:10 a.m., in Kansas City, Mo., 803 miles from Cleveland, Jedon Edmond found a gun in his parents’ apartment and pulled the trigger, accidentally firing a round into his face. Jedon, who died at a hospital, was 2. Eighty minutes later, Damien Santoyo was standing on a porch in Chicago as a car drove by, and someone inside opened fire, striking the 14-year-old in the head. He died at the scene. Less than two hours after that, at almost the exact same moment, a 15-year-old boy in Louisville was blasted in both legs outside a club, and a 16-year-old girl in Danville, Va., was fatally wounded on a street corner by a round meant for someone else. Then, on a Metro car just outside the nation’s capital, an 18-year-old man accidentally shot his 14-year-old half brother in the stomach. Then, in Kansas City, Kan., three teenagers were shot inside a car, and two of them, one 16 and the other 17, were killed. Then, in a parking lot in High Point, N.C., a 14-year-old boy caught in crossfire was struck in the arm.Almost two dozen kids are shot every day in the U.S. This 4-year-old was one of them. | The Washington Post
Finally, at 11:50 p.m. on an Ohio highway, 4-year-old Carter was stalked in his car seat. Hill allowed The Washington Post to tell his story and to interview him, his family, and his nurses and doctors because she wanted people to understand all that he endured. What led to his shooting, she said, began earlier that night. She was leaving her mother’s apartment complex with Carter and Dahalia when they came upon the white Pontiac blocking the road. She honked and waited, until finally the car backed out of the way. It followed her onto the interstate. Then came the gunfire. On average, 23 children were shot each day in the United States in 2015, according to a Post review of the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. That’s at least one bullet striking a growing body every 63 minutes. In total, an estimated 8,400 children were hit, and more died — 1,458 — than in any year since at least 2010. That death toll exceeds the entire number of U.S. military fatalities in Afghanistan this decade. Many incidents, though, never become public because they happen in small towns or the injuries aren’t deemed newsworthy or the triggers are pulled by teens committing suicide. Caring for children wounded by gunfire comes with a substantial price tag. Ted Miller, an economist who has studied the topic for nearly 30 years, estimated that the medical and mental health costs for just the 2015 victims will exceed $290 million.
Dowd can rattle off number after number to illustrate the country’s crisis, but few are more jarring than a study of 2010 World Health Organization data published in the American Journal of Medicine last year: Among high-income nations, 91 percent of children younger than 15 who were killed by gunfire lived in the United States.