As a mother and now a grandmother, I cannot help asking that question.
Since the beginning of time, parents have feared for our children’s health and safety, often with good reason. Children are accident-prone, partly from lack of life experience, and they get sick. Over time, we have addressed children’s needs with safety gear like car seats and bicycle helmets, preventative measures like swimming lessons, and medical tools including antibiotics and vaccines against diseases that historically disable and kill them.
It has felt like we are making progress.
But we are wrong. Very wrong when it comes to children and firearms.
The leading cause of child and teen death in the United States is no longer vehicle accidents or diseases like cancer. It is gunshots, both accidental and intentional. Let that sink in for a moment. While our young people are dying from those causes as well as drugs including hard to control and highly lethal fentanyl, guns take more young lives than any other cause.
No other peer nation in the world even comes close to that grim statistic.
KKF, a health policy organization, reported 4733 gun deaths in children between 1- 19 in the United States in 2021. Canada (2019 data) was next with 48. Other than our two countries, no other nation reported firearms among the top 5 causes of death for young people.
If that is not enough to convince Americans that we have a real and growing problem—crisis is probably a better word—on our hands, consider this from Pew Research. While the alarming rise in firearm child fatalities is part of an overall increase in gun deaths, it is a dramatic part. Between 2019 and 2021, the number of children killed by firearms increased by 50 percent. Pew Research also reports that the majority of these deaths in children were homicides, fully 60 percent, with suicides accounting for 32 percent. Only 5 percent of those deaths were accidental. Of childhood deaths by firearms, older children 12-17, are more likely at 86 percent of gun deaths to be killed than younger children, and boys are far more likely to die by gunshot than girls, 83 percent to 17 percent. It is difficult to assess the magnitude of non-fatal gunshot injuries, but experts estimate them at 2 to 4 times greater than gunshot fatalities.
So how is all this violence and death affecting children and teenagers?
KKF and other researchers have found correlations between gun violence and significant problems for children and teenagers who have experienced gun violence themselves and many who simply fear it. These include post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety of varying levels, poor school performance, school absenteeism, and mental health issues, including clinical depression and suicide.
We all love our children and grandchildren and want them to be safe and to grow into productive and happy adults. None of us want them to be afraid or to suffer from anxiety or mental health problems. Our greatest fear is that they are injured or even killed, as increasing numbers of America’s children are. Children profoundly affected by firearms may not be yours or mine, but they belong to and are loved by someone.
So, the question becomes, why are we not addressing the issues of firearm proliferation and firearm violence in meaningful ways before the fact instead of weeping after a gunshot tragedy?
Could it be that we love our guns more than we love our children?