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Comment by stametseater | Hacker News Reader

If the cutoff was 18 , 21, or even 25 I wouldn't bat an eye. But a cutoff of 19 suggests manipulation of the statistic to achieve a desired outcome.

18 - Old enough to vote, join the army without parental permission.

21 - Old enough to drink and buy cigarettes. Also the age used for numerous firearm purchase/carry laws, when that age isn't 18.

25 - Popularly claimed to be when the human brain reaches maturity, or something like that.

19 - ....has "teen" in the word?

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They are likely adopting the WHO definition of adolescence as ages 10-19: https://www.who.int/health-topics/adolescent-health#tab=tab_...

This makes sense for international comparison. The supplemental material of the 2016 version compares with other countries: https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMsr1804754/suppl_f...

> 10-19

But that's not the age range they used.

Because they combine children and adolescents (1-19). In their 2018 publication [0], you can see they actually do distinguish between younger children (1-4), older children (5-9), and adolescents (10-19). Your complaint was that 19 is an arbitrary cutoff, or even in bad faith, but it’s actually a common established definition in health contexts.

[0] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsr1804754

My guess is that 19 is when a cohort is 100% out of school. If you cut off at 18 you'd miss many highschool seniors, and therefore lots of school shooting deaths.

That would require an incredible slant towards exclusively 18-year-olds being killed in school shootings, and an exceptional overestimation of just how many school shooting deaths there are per capita for it to make that kind of difference.

Yes, the standard is 19 because that's when you stop being a teenager. It's a pretty common range.

That's the most arbitrary of those four age ranges, set by a fluke of English terminology and not aligning with any laws or social norms.

It aligns with the WHO definition of adolescence (10-19).

then you would expect the groups to be 1-9 and 10-19

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