Note: Other race groups are non-Hispanic.īlack and Hispanic boys and girls are likelier, on average, than their white counterparts to live in neighborhoods with high levels of poverty, a situation that often stems from structurally racist practices like segregation. 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. Gun-death rates have risen most drastically for Black boys, but the rate has also risen in recent years for white and Hispanic boys, and for Black girls. Comparatively, the gun-death rate for white boys last year was less than five out of every 100,000. By last year, nearly 26 out of every 100,000 Black boys in the United States were killed. Five years ago, it was 15 out of every 100,000. While guns became the leading cause of death for American children only recently, they have been the leading cause of death among Black children for at least two decades.Ībout a decade ago, Black boys were killed with guns at a rate of about 12 out of every 100,000. The recent spike in gun deaths for Black children builds on a continuing phenomenon in which some children are exposed to much more violence than others. did not publish rates for Asian or Native American girls in most years because of low numbers. “It’s just so easy when you get in arguments, when you rob somebody - if you have a gun, it’s so much easier to kill.” “Where there are more guns around, there’s more death,” he said. Overall, he said, he worried that the proliferation of guns in America would lead to more and more deaths among children. (Infants have their own distinct mortality risks, and their deaths are often studied separately from children ages 1 and older.)ĭavid Hemenway, a professor of health policy at Harvard University and co-director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, said that gun-ownership rates and other factors may explain some of the demographic differences in how children die by gunfire, but more data is needed to answer the question definitively. The analysis focused on children ages 1 through 18, which includes many high school seniors. Using this data, The New York Times set out to examine how guns are shaping American childhood, and to understand which children have been most at risk. The Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit organization that has tracked deaths and injuries related to gun violence since 2014, compiles location and other data for thousands of fatal shootings. collects information on the gender and race of each child shot and killed. There is no comprehensive data describing the nature of each fatal shooting in America - say, the number of children who died in circumstances related to domestic violence or gang-related fights or accidental shootings. 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. What is clear is that the United States is an extreme outlier when it comes to gun fatalities among children. 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. Gun accidents that kill children have also ticked up in the last decade, though they are relatively uncommon, totaling fewer than 150 in most years. Still, in America, among children who die by gunfire, Black and Hispanic children are more likely to be killed by others, and white children are more likely to kill themselves. The share of gun suicides for Black and Hispanic children has been growing, too. A decade ago, the number of white children who killed themselves with a gun totaled around 500 annually in three of the last five years, that figure has surpassed 700. Unlike homicides, suicides disproportionately involve white children, mostly teenage boys. Last year, suicides made up nearly 30 percent of child gun deaths - 1,078. The number of children who die by suicide with a gun has also risen to a historical high over the last decade. 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. Since 2018, they have increased by more than 73 percent. Last year, nearly two-thirds of gun deaths involving children - 2,279 - were homicides. No group of American children has been spared, but some have fared far worse. The stories of 12 American children killed by guns this year.
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