Just days after another deadly shooting at an elementary school in Texas, health experts revealed that firearms are now the leading cause of death for children and adolescents ages 0 to 19 years across the United States, with a surprising increase of 83% in the deaths of young people by firearms in the last decade.
Nineteen children and two teachers were killed last week in a mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas. It was the second deadliest school shooting in US history and prompted calls for urgent action to reduce such deaths.
However, few issues are as politically polarized in the United States as gun policy, and most proposals lack bipartisan support.
A recent national survey by the Pew Research Center showed that the 64% of Democrats consider gun violence to be a very big problem for the country, compared to the 18% of Republicans who say the same thing.
This partisan divide is also growing: Divisions over guns have been growing steadily since 2016, and the youth of the United States are paying the price.
The situation has gotten so bad that firearms have become the leading cause of death among youth in the United States. There is an increase in deaths from firearms (83% from 2013) and a decrease in motor vehicle fatalities (60% since 2000), wrote the authors of these statistics, published in The Lancet.
The 64% of deaths by firearms among young people since 2010 were homicides. While firearm deaths began to rise in 2014, the authors argue that the “social shock of the pandemic” likely it accelerated the rise with declining well-being and escalating mental health stressors.
The changes in the lives of young people during the pandemic occurred after a long vacuum of prevention efforts to reduce deaths by firearms, they added.
“The foundations for firearms injury prevention are just beginning to be established, which contrasts with other instituted injury prevention systems,” they wrote. “Motor vehicle injury prevention has an infrastructure and has led to a huge decrease in fatalities. For firearms, the absence of an intentional and methodical public health approach has led to the opposite results.”
Looking more closely at recent statistics, there are also large racial and ethnic disparities when it comes to youth gun violence. Non-Hispanic African American youth (-19 years) had an increase of 40 % of deaths by firearms between 2019 Y 2020.
Only in 2020, black adolescents died by firearm homicide at a rate of 21 times that of white teens, according to the most recent data from the CDC.
In their comment published in The Lancet, the authors They argue that these racial disparities “are rooted in structural and cultural poverty and racism” in the United States. This leads to a “skewed perception of gun-related violence in the minority population” and also reduces the sense of urgency of the problem, they added, calling for more action by lawmakers to address the problem.
Also read:
· ‘There is a room full of Victims’: Chilling New Audio of the Texas School Shooting
· Texas Massacre: What is common in the profile of young people shootings in US schools?
School gunman in Uvalde, Texas, worked at Wendy’s to save $4,000 to buy weapons and ammunition