Are guns the biggest killer of ‘children and teens’?
“I recently learned an alarming statistic — gun injuries are the number one killer of children and teens in this country.”
— actor Harry Hamlin, in an ad sponsored by the Ad Council, June 2025
The Ad Council, which distributes public service announcements, last year launched a $10 million campaign to inform Americans of the statistic cited by Hamlin in one of the recent ads. In announcing the campaign, the Ad Council noted that a poll has found that just 26 percent of Americans surveyed “selected gun injuries as the leading cause of death among children, demonstrating a need for further education.”
Related Knowledge Center: Fact-checking and its detractors
Fact-checking has become a familiar tool for political reporters to hold office-holders and candidates accountable. But critics ask if fact-checkers sometimes miss the forest for the trees, and if the practice often struggles with false equivalency the way conventional political coverage does.