Gun deaths of U.S. kids up 50% in grim new record

With gun violence rising in the United States, new research shows that the number of U.S. kids killed by gunfire has hit a record high – a concerning trend as the country reels from another mass school shooting last month.

Roughly 2,590 gun deaths of children and teenagers under the age of 18 were recorded in 2021 – a staggering 50 per cent jump since 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a Pew Research Center analysis published Thursday.

These were all the fatalities when firearms were listed as the underlying cause of death.

The gun death rate among children and teens also spiked to 3.5 fatalities per 100,000 minor residents over that same two-year period, the Pew analysis of CDC data showed.

Both mark the highest numbers since 1999, which is when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) started including that data for under-18s in its mortality database.

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Most gun deaths among children  – a total of 60 per cent – in 2021 were homicides, while one-third were suicides and the remaining were accidents.

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The majority of fatalities were among boys, accounting for 83 per cent of the total gun deaths of children.

Older kids aged 12 to 17 were also more likely than younger children to get killed by gunfire, the data showed.

This comes as the country was shaken by another mass shooting at a Christian elementary school in Nashville last month that left three children and three staff members dead.

Since 2006, there have been eight mass killings at K-12 schools in which four or more people were killed within a 24-hour period, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University.

Everytown for Gun Safety, a U.S. gun control advocacy group, tracks data differently and measures every incident of gunfire on school properties in the country. That group says there have been at least 39 incidents of gunfire on school properties in the U.S. so far in 2023, with 177 incidents in 2022, 202 incidents in 2021, 96 incidents in 2020 and 130 incidents in 2019.

The deaths tracked from those incidents were pegged at 17 (to date), 57, 49, 24, and 33 for each respective year.

Overall, 2021 also saw the largest yearly number of gun deaths across all ages in the U.S., with 48,830 people killed by gunfire. That is a 23 per cent increase from 2019.

— with files from The Associated Press.