I’ve commented on the issue of the biggest dangers to young people here. And here is more corroboration for the perspective I gave.
Car Crashes Leading Cause of Teen Deaths in U.S.
Of the more than 16,000 teenagers who die in the United States each year, most are killed in automobile accidents, but murder, suicide, cancer and heart disease also take their toll, a new government report finds.
In fact, among black male teens, homicide is the leading cause of death, said report author Arialdi M. Minino, a statistician at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.
“This is a group of people we don’t pay much attention to when we talk about mortality,” Minino said. Teen deaths account for less than 1 percent of all deaths per year in the United States, he noted.
Still, Minino thinks that more needs to be done to cut the number of teenage deaths.
“These are preventable causes of death,” he said. “So, this is a group where we can extend ourselves so kids won’t die, by extending common sense ideas.”
Each year in the United States, an estimated 16,375 children between the ages of 12 and 19 die. Nearly 50 percent die in accidents, with car crashes accounting for more than one-third of all deaths, Minino found.
But among black male teens, murder is the leading cause of death. Moreover, the highest teen death rate is among black males at 94.1 deaths per 100,000 people. “That’s 50 times more than among white males. That’s a very large disparity,” Minino said.
The leading causes of death among teens stayed the same during the period studied, Minino noted. Accidents accounted for 48 percent of deaths; homicide, 13 percent; suicide, 11 percent; cancer, 6 percent; and heart disease, 3 percent.
In addition, from 1999 to 2006, the annual death rate for teens has remained constant, at about 49.5 deaths per 100,000 population, Minino said.
But the risk of dying is not the same for all teenagers. Boys are more likely to die than girls, and older teens are at higher risk of dying than younger teens.
For example, for 12-year-old boys the death rate is 46 percent higher than for girls. At 19, the death rate is three times higher for boys than girls (135.2 deaths and 46.1 deaths per 100,000, respectively), Minino found.
“I wish people would look at these groups with an eye toward intervention,” Minino said. Teenagers are a “relatively neglected group when it comes to public health.”
Another expert sees the human cost of teen deaths and stressed that even though the number of deaths is low, teenage deaths should not be ignored.
“I hope when people read this report they realize how sobering it is and are not falsely lulled by the fact that these adolescent deaths ‘only’ make up 1 percent of total deaths,” said Dr. Karen Sheehan, medical director of the Injury Prevention and Research Center at Children’s Memorial Hospital and medical director of the Injury Free Coalition for Kids in Chicago.
When thinking about deaths of young people, it is important to consider the years of potential life lost, she said.
“Every one of these 16,000 adolescents who died will never get married . . or contribute positively to society,” Sheehan said. “We should be appalled that this many deaths happen to children this age, and we should be ashamed that these deaths occur disproportionately in certain populations.”
Hmm… this last strikes me as a ridiculous comment. Should we be less ashamed if the murder rate among non-black young males was just as high as that for blacks? It isn’t the disproportionality of which we should be ashamed. It is our failure to deal with the cause of the young black male murder rate that shames us. That cause is well known to everyone, namely the fact that most of those killing and being killed did not have married fathers in the home raising them. THAT is the biggest single factor, not race itself.
The government policies that have encouraged the destruction of the black family are also well known, aren’t they?
So much for “promoting the general welfare.”
May 7th, 2010 3:48 pm
“These are preventable causes of death,†he said. “So, this is a group where we can extend ourselves so kids won’t die, by extending common sense ideas.â€
Common to who, and sensilble to who? With the secular drive to diversity there is no longer commonality. Also, what makes sense to one person, or group, in any given circumstance, may not make sense to others. When there is no basis for law, or, civil behavior, the relative doesn’t creep in, it strolls in proudly. The whole basis for this article is built on sand of their own gathering.
May 15th, 2010 2:48 pm
If “…these deaths occur disproportionately in certain populations.†and many of these deaths are perpetrated by the same “certain populations”, maybe the “certain populations” need to readjust somewhere.
May 16th, 2010 11:15 pm
Young black males who get murdered a lot more than other groups would certainly have a much lower number of “married fathers in the home raising them.” I must assume that most of those young black males who are murdered are those young black fathers. Aren’t you talking about the same group of people? It seems to me that if one were to look for a cause, one would look for the reason why everybody is murdering one another. Are you saying they are killing one another because they left their children with their mothers? I guess you could say they’re leaving their kids at home for their own protection while they go out and shoot each other. Then after they’re shot dead, naturally their families are now fatherless.
I’ve witnessed government policies destroying poor families with their dignity-robbing freebies. But I would say the most destructive policies by far, are those that have created this huge lucrative, brutal, criminal black market that causes children to shower children with bullets.
May 17th, 2010 12:14 am
Hmmm..
Innermore, I’m afraid the numbers tell a different story. No one is saying that “most black males are murdered”, only that the rate is higher than for other racial/demographic groups. But most live. On the other hand, most black children are raised without a married father in the home. The cause is not because most of these fathers are being murdered. That would imply millions of murders each year, which just isn’t happening.
The “freebies” don’t rob dignity unless they are allowed to, but what they do is create an incentive for bad behavior, by funding it. You don’t rob me of my dignity by offering me a gift. I rob myself of dignity by becoming dependent on your largesse.
May 17th, 2010 12:28 pm
I still logically contend that historically, most innercity, young, black, gangbanging, potential fathers end up murdered during a turf battle or bad drug deal. This causes a shortage of potential black fathers, which may have helped establish an immoral cultural trend, who knows. I acknowledge that government welfare dependency is part of the moral confusion too. It’s economically prudent for welfare mothers not to have a father around messing up benefit calculations.
In the projects, the criminal activities drove out all the legitimate activities a long time ago, so selling drugs seems like the only way out of economic poverty to many. And I bet most of these participants knew what they were doing was immoral, at least at one time. Yet drug wars, incarceration, family destruction, even moral destruction cannot combat the eternal demand and 6-figure profits that make this illegal activity worth the risk. It’s silly to blame anyone, but I think this all happened due partly to society’s inconsistent legal and moral messages.
My teenage son likes to bring to my attention our society’s ridiculously hypocritical morality. It is immoral to ingest mind-altering substances, but only certain ones. We can’t include television gossip-addiction, over-diagnosed medication, or real and imagined environmental toxins on our immoralities list right now. It is immoral to break the law, but only certain ones. Debt delinquency, slander as free speech, undocumented slavery; not those. Maybe later. I also notice most of these moral inconsistencies help create illegitimate economic opportunities that exceed the $ucce$$e$ of many legitimate ones at times, especially in big cities.
I’ll probably receive a tongue-lashing so I hate to say it but, our religious institutions are failing to provide much effective moral leadership or guidance on this. Not because the message is wrong or inaccurate, but because of religion’s recent decision to sleep with (or appear to be sleeping with) our ineffective political institutions. So now, since we can’t trust our political institutions’ solutions to social problems, how are we expected to trust our religious institutions’ solutions to moral problems? I know I know, Christian activists (left and right) would very loudly argue that they are attempting to change or evangelize our political institutions. Noble idea. But ummm… it looks like the change is happening the other way around to me. But that’s just me.
More importantly, in the meantime now we have this secularized christian moral fog filling this moral leadership void. Worse yet, those of us who are trying to fight this evil are rendered fatally ineffective just by the mere appearance of association with the faintly good parts of it. Verrry frustrating.