Devastating, Sobering Facts on Gun Deaths and Children

 From the New York Times,

Childhood’s Greatest Danger: The Data on Kids and Gun Violence

(I am gifting this article so there is no paywall to get behind.)

For much of the nation’s history, disease was the No. 1 killer of children. Then America became the land of the automobile, and by the 1960s, motor-vehicle crashes were the most common way for children to die. Twenty years ago, well after the advent of the seatbelt, an American child was still three times as likely to die in a car accident as to be killed by a firearm. 

We’re now living in the era of the gun.

In 2014, the rate began to creep up, and by 2020 guns became the leading killer.

Overall, gun deaths among children jumped sharply in 2020 and again in 2021. A 31 percent increase for children 17 and 18 since 2019 is troubling enough, but the increase was 74 percent for children 9 and younger.

Not cancer, not non-gun accidents - guns are what kill American children.

Last year, nearly two-thirds of gun deaths involving children — 2,279 — were homicides.

Most homicides involved Black children, who make up a small share of all children but shoulder the burden of gun violence more than any others, a disparity that is growing sharply. Black children represented almost half of all gun deaths and two-thirds of gun homicides involving youths last year, despite making up about only 15 percent of children in America. 

Although girls make up a small portion of total gun deaths, the imbalance between Black girls and all other girls is vast and quickly widening.

Suicide 

The number of children who die by suicide with a gun has also risen to a historical high over the last decade. Last year, suicides made up nearly 30 percent of child gun deaths — 1,078. Unlike homicides, suicides disproportionately involve white children, mostly teenage boys.

Versus the rest of the world?

What is clear is that the United States is an extreme outlier when it comes to gun fatalities among children. When researchers at the Kaiser Family Foundation recently compared a set of similarly large and wealthy nations, they found that among this group, the United States accounted for 46 percent of the child population but 97 percent of all child gun deaths.

Schools and Gun Violence

And though the number of school shootings has recently risen to the highest level on record, the overall picture is so much worse; these shootings account for less than 1 percent of the total gun deaths suffered by American children.

Why?

Researchers who study gun violence say that it is difficult to explain exactly why gun deaths among children have risen so quickly, but most emphasize that the increased availability of guns — especially handguns, which tend to be used in homicides and suicides and also tend to be stored less safely than some other types of guns — has most likely played a role.

Jonathan Jay, an assistant professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health, recently co-published research showing that racial disparities in childhood exposure to neighborhood gun violence grew during the pandemic.

“There were two things that I feel are largely responsible,” said Jagdish Khubchandani, a professor of public health at New Mexico State University. “One is the socioeconomic upheaval that occurred in the country. No. 2 is that the share of households with children that own guns keeps increasing.”

“We have to think about the repercussions of it,” she said, “for decades to come.”

Moms Demand Action

Everytown for Gun Safety

About Washington State:

Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence 

Alliance for Gun Responsibility