The idiot box has been living up to the nickname.
In recent months television viewers have been subjected to a series of anti-gun propaganda pieces produced by the Ad Council. Dubbed the Agree to Agree campaign, the ads typically feature a misleading talking point about “children” and firearms followed by an invitation to go to the Ad Council effort’s website where visitors are bombarded with further gun control agitprop. The website even invites visitors to learn about how to secure red flag gun confiscation orders.
The name might suggest an effort to bridge political disagreements, but the campaign’s list of “stakeholder partners” shows it’s a gun control effort through and through. So-called “stakeholder partners” include: Brady: United Against Gun Violence (formerly Handgun Control, Inc.); Giffords (formerly Americans for Responsibly Solutions and the Second Amendment-denying Legal Community Against Violence); Everytown for Gun Safety; and the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions at the Bloomberg School of Public Health (named for billionaire gun control financier Michael Bloomberg). Handgun prohibition organization Violence Policy Center is not listed, although their longtime benefactor the Joyce Foundation was involved.
The campaign’s headline factoid is the following: “Gun injuries are now the leading cause of death for children and teens ages 1‑17, surpassing car crashes for the first time in two decades.” To justify the claim, the Ad Council cites a report from the Bloomberg School of Public Health.
For decades, gun control advocates and their allies in “public health” have pushed misleading talking points about children and firearms and NRA-ILA has repeatedly called them out for it.
This is how the ploy works: Step one, acquire statistics on firearm-related deaths among actual children. Step two, combine that relatively low number with the far greater number of firearm-related deaths involving juveniles and young adults. Step three, present the resulting data as the shocking number of “children” or “children and teens” (ages 0-17, 0-19 or 0-24) who are subjected to “gun violence” each day/week/month/year. Step four, use the disingenuous statistic to advocate for pre-determined gun control policies by claiming “gun violence is the leading cause of death of children.”
Consider the data on those who may be properly defined as children – ages 0-14. For this cohort, firearm-related injuries are not the leading causes of death and are not higher than motor vehicle deaths. The number of motor vehicle deaths in this age group was more than 40-percent higher than firearm-related deaths in 2023.
This does shift when examining the cohorts ages 15-17, 15-19, or 15-24. Roughly 70-percent of the firearm-related deaths that occur in the 0-17 age group happened among the juveniles ages 15-17 in 2023. This disparity shouldn’t be surprising. The 15-17 cohort is far more often engaged in the type of street crime that can give rise to firearm-related violence and that many jurisdictions have decided to address in a more lenient manner in recent years. The conflation of this age group with young children is even more absurd when one considers that, in the vast majority of jurisdictions, those aged 15 and older can be prosecuted as adults.
The Ad Council’s claim proved so misleading that even the normally indifferent legacy press took notice.
On June 11, the Kansas City Star published the piece “I tried to solve the great gun mystery at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. It didn’t go well,” by David Mastio. The piece chronicles Mastio’s attempt to get a straight answer from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health as to whether firearms are in fact the leading cause of death for children. The author explained:
While the school’s report, Gun Violence in the United States 2022, says over and over again that guns are the leading killer of children and teens age 1-17, it never says what the leading killer of children not including teens is.
After failing to receive an answer to his simple question from the Bloomberg school’s gun violence researchers via email, Mastio went to the Johns Hopkins campus in Baltimore for help. He was escorted out by security.
Mastio eventually received an answer to his question when he contacted the public health school’s Center on Injury Research and Policy (which does not focus narrowly on gun policy). The author explained:
Surely there is somebody else at the Bloomberg School who knows what kills kids ages 1-9. Sure enough, there was another research group, The Center on Injury Research and Policy. I emailed them, and in a matter of hours, they gave me the answer.
I’ll give you one guess what that is. You’re right – not guns. Not even close. Mishaps with things other than guns, such as drownings, falls and car accidents, are the big killers.
This was followed on June 18 by a piece on the Ad Council Campaign from Washington Post factchecker Glenn Kessler titled “Are guns the biggest killer of ‘children and teens’?”
Understanding the manipulation at work, Kessler wrote,
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.
As for children, ages 1 to 9 as defined by Johns Hopkins, firearms deaths are so much lower that they don’t even make second place.
In his conclusion, Kessler suggested how the campaign’s misdirection actually stands in the way of effective responses:
Firearms are the leading cause of deaths among teens, especially older teens. That’s very clear, especially among Black teens. A more precise statement — highlighting the risk faced by teens — might help focus attention on who the horrible toll of gun violence harms most.
Taxpaying gun owners should know that the federal government routinely funds the Ad Council to the tune of tens of millions of dollars for various public service campaigns. Records from USASpending.gov show that in fiscal years 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 the federal government awarded the organization $16.4 million, $13.6 million, $14.3 million, and $12.8 million, respectively. While these awards were not related to firearm propaganda specifically, they provide lifelines to an organization whose messaging on firearms is not only misleading but potentially counterproductive to sound public policy.
Further, the Agree to Agree campaign website lists its “funding partners,” many of which are significant beneficiaries of government largesse.
This list includes professional associations the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics. In late 2024, the AMA was awarded $4.15 million as part of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “U.S. public health infrastructure and workforce” project. According to USASpending.gov, over the two years 2024 and 2025 federal awards to the AMA totaled more than $10 million.
The AAP did even better. USASpending.gov reports that AAP was awarded $18 million in 2025; which is down from a whopping $29.4 million in 2022.
The taxpayer loot universities involved in this campaign received make those sums look like chump change. The University of Michigan/Michigan Medicine and Johns Hopkins Medicine are listed as funders. USASpending.gov reports that the Regents of the University of Michigan were awarded $1.1 billion in federal funding in 2025. A press release from the school reported, “The federal government consistently remains the largest sponsor of U-M research activity. In FY ‘24, the university reported $1.17 billion in federally sponsored research expenditures.”
In a report titled “How Much Federal Funding Do Colleges and Universities Receive?,” the Urban Institute noted that “Johns Hopkins received more than $4 billion from federal sources in 2022–23, which made up 42 percent of the school’s total revenue that year.”
Then there are the members of the healthcare industry that funded the campaign. According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, national health expenditure (the total amount spent in the U.S. on healthcare) was “$4.9 trillion in 2023… and accounted for 17.6% of Gross Domestic Product.” The government agency also noted that the federal government accounted for 32 percent of total health spending, with state and local governments making up another 16 percent. Somehow, even with healthcare costs exploding, these organizations still find the resources to pursue their boutique political causes.
As with the Ad Council, the federal funding these Agree to Agree “funding partners” enjoy isn’t gun control specific. However, taxpayers should be aware that organizations that receive significant federal resources are involved in propaganda to undermine their fundamental rights.
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