A Pennsylvania physician says the medical community and politicians need to “act meaningfully” to address gun violence among children, but like so many other pro-gun-control opinion pieces, editorials, and soundbites that I’ve been exposed to today, the doctor clammed up when it came to offering an explicit course of action that should be taken.
Dr. Matthew G. Masiello is a pediatrician by trade, and as such I’d like to think that he genuinely cares about his young patients and kids in general.
After every mass shooting involving children, the script is the same.
“Guns don’t fire themselves,” we’re told. “Are you going to ban cars and motorcycles, too?” The line sounds reasonable and practical, but it is neither.
It confuses responsibility and fosters a lack of critical thinking. It pretends we don’t already regulate other dangerous technologies far more strictly than firearms.
Yes, every shooting involves someone pulling a trigger. But that fact doesn’t end the argument – it starts it.
By the way, this is the closest that Masiello gets to telling his audience what he wants. Is it a total ban on gun ownership? Maybe, though Masiello talks about “regulating” cars, not banning them altogether. Then again, he also says cars don’t kill people when they’re working as designed, so maybe he really does want to prohibit gun sales and gun ownership.
Masiello also doesn’t say what prompted his column, but my guess is that it was the horrific murders of eight children in Shreveport, Louisiana; seven of them the children of the man who killed them.
According to the man who owned the gun used in the attack, it was stolen from him by the killer. And according to authorities, neither men were able to legally possess firearms because of previous felony convictions. Unless Masiello is calling for a complete ban on gun ownership (and again, that’s a distinct possibility), I don’t know what kind of regulations could actually stop convicted criminals from stealing guns (or illegally possess them).
We treat dynamite differently from garden tools: You can’t walk into a hardware store and buy explosives because the government decided long ago that the potential for mass harm justifies strict controls.
That is where guns stand apart from cars. The primary purpose of a car or motorcycle is transportation.
We don’t simply “accept” traffic deaths. We regulate cars through training, licensing, registration, renewal, insurance, speed limits, safety standards and federal oversight. We did all of that because those deaths were unacceptable.
The killer in Shreveport is accused of stealing the firearm that he used in his murder spree. He didn’t walk into a gun store and purchase one.
But Masiello also makes it sound like all you have to do in this country to purchase a firearm at a gun store is walk inside and put your money down. In all 50 states you’re going to have to submit to a background check, which has never happened to me at a hardware store, and if you live in states like California or Hawaii you’ll have to wait more than a week before you can take possession of the gun you purchased.
According to his biography, Dr. Masiello’s young son was “wounded by a firearm while playing soccer as a 5-year-old,” and that undoubtably left an impression on both of them. I won’t even try to change Masiello’s mind. I would ask him, though, to be precise in his “treatment plan,” so to speak… and to not hide certain facts that aren’t helpful to his argument.
Masiello trots out the statistic that firearms are the leading cause of death for “children and teens” in the United States, which is true only if you play fast and loose with the definition of children. You have to include young adults 18 and 19-years-old, and you have to exclude every child under the age of 1.
I debunked this stat just last month, but if you don’t feel like reading the entire piece the background was an article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer with a headline proclaiming “gun violence” was the leading cause of death for children in the state. The paper used a report from Children’s Defense Fund-Ohio, but the CDF found that “gun violence” was a (not the) leading cause of death for children in the state, with children defined as anyone 1-to-19. Firearms were actually only involved in 6% of child deaths when you define childhood as birth to age 18.
Masiello, as you might have guessed, repeatedly cites this statistic to demand… something. He never does quite get around to telling us what his prescription to combat gun violence is. His column is like a doctor telling a patient they have cancer, and then telling them how awful cancer is without ever talking about a treatment plan. Oh, there’s something that can be done, he assures the patient. We’re going to “act meaningfully,” as Masiello puts it. He just can’t explain what action we should be taking.
This has been a common theme in my posts here at Bearing Arms today, and I apologize if this feels repetitive. There’s been a deluge of emotionally-wrought and intentionally vague demands for gun control since Saturday, in both old and new media.
Since the guns were legally bought in the state Giffords says “has the strongest gun safety laws in the nation,” they (and other anti-gun orgs) have to go with generic calls for gun control instead of pointing to anything specific https://t.co/wzNSih9PWp
— Rob Romano (@2Aupdates) April 27, 2026
I’m convinced that one of the goals of the gun control lobby in their messaging is to downplay the fact that homicides are at their lowest levels in at least 65 years right now, and violent crime overall is close to record lows as well. Given the two-year spike in gun sales less than a decade ago, the demise of “shall issue” laws, and other factors that gun control groups have insisted will lead to more violence, the United States is safer than its been at any point in my lifetime. That’s remarkable… and it’s absolutely terrible news if you’re a gun control fanatic.
Here’s another dose of cold, hard, truth. Gun-involved deaths among children aren’t spread out evenly across the juvenile population. As the Washington Post reported last year:
In its 2022 report on 2020 data (ages 1 to 19), the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions listed 4,357 deaths from firearms and 3,639 deaths from vehicle crashes. In the latest study (ages 1 to 17), the report showed 2,526 deaths from firearms and 2,240 deaths from vehicle crashes in 2022. That’s a smaller difference.
(Johns Hopkins does not include children under 1 because they have perinatal deaths and congenital anomalies — unique, age-specific death risks. This decision marginally reduces the number of children killed by firearms. But it also greatly reduces the number of motor vehicle deaths. The results also change depending on whether only traffic-related crashes are counted instead of an overall motor vehicle category.)
But when older teens (15 to 17, as defined by Johns Hopkins) are removed from the calculations using the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS), the numbers change dramatically, with almost 50 percent more deaths from vehicle crashes than firearms. Vehicle crashes exceed firearms deaths also for ages 1 to 15.
So, suicides and homicides involving firearms are the leading cause of death for 16 and 17-year-olds in the United States, not all children.
Why does this matter? Because Dr. Masiello and too many of his colleagues are misdiagnosing the problem here. Politicians haven’t failed the people by not passing whatever gun control Masiello doesn’t want to explicitly call for. We have a failed juvenile justice system and a broken mental health system in this country, and fixing those institutions (or at least making them functional) should be our top priority when it comes to reducing gun homicides, gun suicides, and gun accidents among those under the age of 18.
Masiello should look into a microscope to more closely examine the problem he’s identified instead of making a diagnosis based on a surface-level eyeballing of cherry-picked stats. And if it really is a nationwide gun ban that he’s hoping for, I’ve got some bad news for the good doctor.
Read the full article here
