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

By Robert Gebeloff, Danielle Ivory, Bill Marsh, Allison McCann and Albert Sun

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.

The gun-death rate for children is nearly five in every 100,000. It was flat for more than a decade starting in 2000, and most years fewer than three in every 100,000 children were killed by guns. In 2014, the rate began to creep up, and by 2020 guns became the leading killer.

Last year was a particularly violent one: 3,597 children died by gunfire, according to provisional statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The death rate from guns was the highest it has been in more than 20 years. While the statistics for this year are incomplete, it is clear that the carnage has not receded.

In May, the nation watched as horror unfolded in Uvalde, Texas. Yet another school ripped apart by bullets — yet another group of children to mourn. Yet another shooting in a long line of school shootings. 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.

No group of American children has been spared, but some have fared far worse. Last year, nearly two-thirds of gun deaths involving children — 2,279 — were homicides. Since 2018, they have increased by more than 73 percent. 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.

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. 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.

The share of gun suicides for Black and Hispanic children has been growing, too. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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. The C.D.C. collects information on the gender and race of each child shot and killed. 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.

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 analysis focused on children ages 1 through 18, which includes many high school seniors. (Infants have their own distinct mortality risks, and their deaths are often studied separately from children ages 1 and older.)

David 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.

Overall, he said, he worried that the proliferation of guns in America would lead to more and more deaths among children. “Where there are more guns around, there’s more death,” he said. “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.”

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. This disparity of death has grown significantly worse in recent years. Black children are now nearly six times as likely as white children to be killed with a gun.

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. 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.

About a decade ago, Black boys were killed with guns at a rate of about 12 out of every 100,000. Five years ago, it was 15 out of every 100,000. By last year, nearly 26 out of every 100,000 Black boys in the United States were killed. Comparatively, the gun-death rate for white boys last year was less than five out of every 100,000.

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. 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.

Black 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. And they’re more likely to be proximate to the kinds of violence that are concentrated in those neighborhoods.

Although the pandemic cannot be fully responsible for a trend that began well before the pandemic, researchers said that stresses related to Covid, which has killed Black and Hispanic people at higher rates than white people, might have exacerbated existing differences in gun deaths among both adults and children in recent years.

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.

“In places where violence is endemic, people pick up guns because they feel unsafe, and that perpetuates cycles of violence,” Jay said. “During the pandemic, the trauma of losing loved ones to Covid, seeing Black and brown people being killed by police and then seeing an increase in violence likely have all perpetuated cycles of violence.”

He added, “Because of this cyclical nature, it makes sense that a lot of folks continue to feel unsafe.”

The geography of gun violence is complex. It is growing fastest in urban areas but is also growing in suburban neighborhoods and in rural America. Most of the states with the highest rates of child gun deaths are in the South, but nowhere is immune.

One pattern is consistent: Poor neighborhoods and those with a high population of Black residents, whether in cities or suburbs, are more likely to suffer from gun violence than others. Children growing up in poor neighborhoods in the Houston metro area are twice as likely to be shot and killed as other children there. In the Chicago area, the child gun-death rate in poor neighborhoods is 7.5 times as high as in others. In the St. Louis area, it’s 10 times as high.

This geographic analysis is based on data from the Gun Violence Archive, which collects information from law enforcement and media reports, but excludes most suicides, which are rarely publicly reported.

Historically, child gun deaths have occurred in the same neighborhoods that are experiencing the marked rise in gun violence today. What is different now is the scale. These communities, already the sites of so much loss, are now where children are shot and killed more often and at a higher concentration than even a few years ago — shootings frequently occur within an area of just a few blocks.

Older children die from gun violence at a much higher rate than younger ones. But another disturbing part of the current crisis is the rapid rise in deaths of younger children, who account for a growing share of the toll. Precise reasons for the spike in gun deaths among the youngest children are not known, but the increase coincides with an unprecedented rise in gun sales since 2019.

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.

“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.”

Uncertainty related to the pandemic, the 2020 presidential election, the protests over policing and the country’s unsettled economic outlook were all drivers of gun sales, Khubchandani said, and many buyers were people who had never owned guns. The wider presence of these weapons, he said, increased the chance of guns being involved in accidents, being used in domestic disputes and being available to young people contemplating suicide.

About 45 percent of gun homicides of children and more than half of suicides last year were among children under 17. Once again, racial disparity is present at all ages. Black children are now far more likely to be shot and killed than white children at every age — from the moment they can walk until they are old enough to vote.

The sharp rise and stark inequality of these gun deaths have a devastating impact — beyond the already horrific impact of any child dying. “The cost of gun violence extends so far beyond that,” said Maya Rossin-Slater, an associate professor of health policy at Stanford University. “In addition to each life lost, there are whole communities, whole families, whole neighborhoods, whole schools where people experience these lasting adverse impacts on so many measures of their well-being.”

Rossin-Slater said she worried that the peers of the children killed were being affected by this trauma during the most formative years of their childhood and adolescence, which would have negative downstream effects for their mental and physical health, educational trajectories, economic stability and, broadly, their happiness.

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

Sources: The primary source on child gun deaths through 2020 was the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Underlying Cause of Death data. For 2021, provisional data was used, though the population used in calculating rates for 2021 was held at 2020 levels because of changes in race and ethnicity definitions in the newer data’s population estimates. Cause-of-death categories were built using definitions employed by leading mortality researchers at the University of Michigan. The geographic analysis was conducted using data gathered by the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that collects information from law enforcement, the news media and other reports of gun episodes. For each location of a child gun death, demographic information about the neighborhood was attached using census tract data from the 2020 American Community Survey. Map data from OpenStreetMap.

Additional work by Sarah Cahalan.