The report, published Friday, found that in the first six months of this year, children 17 years old and younger died from accidental shootings "far more than ... federal statistics indicate."
"The only government data that's available comes from the CDC, and we found that that data is very incomplete," Ryan Foley, a member of the AP's national reporting team, told PBS' Hari Sreenivasan in an interview. "And the CDC admits that it is undercounting these because many local coroners classify these shootings as homicides other than unintentional or accidental."
The investigation analyzed more than 1,000 deaths and injuries from accidental shootings involving minors between January 2014 and June 2016. During that time, more than 320 minors were killed in accidental shootings involving minors. Nearly 700 other children were injured.
Foley said that the investigation collected data from the Gun Violence Archive, a national group that "tries to track every single gun incident in the United States."
The report stated that Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Georgia are among the states with the highest per capita rates of accidental shootings involving minors and that most accidental shootings occur in homes where handguns are legally owned by adults for self-protection.
"In many cases, they're able to access their parents' unsecured loaded guns," Foley told Sreenivasan. "And they also pointed them back at their own faces, we found, and shot themselves by accident."
The findings also showed a spike in the number of shootings that resulted in death or injury involving 3-year-olds -- "the vast majority of which were self-inflicted."
Another spike was noted for teens aged 15-17.
"Those usually involve groups of teenagers who manage to obtain a gun and it accidentally goes off and kills a sibling or a friend," Foley said.
Read more at USA Today.
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