Kendall Munson was so concerned about the violence in her neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago that she sent her children to live with their grandparents on the outskirts of Atlanta. But death found them anyway.
On December 9, Elyjah, 11, a playful boy who liked football, was heading to a gas station with friends to buy snacks on the way out of school. One of his best friends, 12, took a gun from his backpack and shot the boy in the head.
It was the second time in the past year that gun violence had left the family in a state of shock. Two weeks before Elyjah’s death, a five-year-old cousin of his, Khalis Eberhart, was shot dead when another cousin, just three years old, found a gun under a sofa cushion.
“It’s easy to find a gun. It’s easy for our kids to have access to a gun,” says Munson, who believes her son’s death was unintentional. “That’s what happens when you’re a kid and you’re touching something you think is a toy.”
The number of children and teenagers shot dead has risen sharply during the pandemic in the United States. Researchers characterize this fact as a fatal consequence of the national increase in homicide rates, untreated trauma from Covid and a large increase in the acquisition of weapons – which puts more children in contact with these items, as victims or shooters.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported a 50% increase in firearm deaths among children under 14 between 2019 and 2020.
And the number seems to have grown even more. More than 1,500 children and adolescents up to the age of 18 were killed in homicides and by accidental shootings in 2021, up from around 1,380 in the previous year. The data is from the Gun Violence Archive, a database of information from public sources that counts firearm deaths in real time ahead of official government counts.
Children who are little more than babies have been finding pistols under piles of laundry or on the couch. Teenagers get ghost weapons made with kits online and which are impossible to trace. High school students carry revolvers to protect themselves.
Although the incidence of children who are shot dead is much lower than that of adults, the rise in the statistic scares law enforcement officials and families alike. “We see the same thing over and over again,” says Keith Meadows, police chief in South Fulton, Georgia, where two young children — one of them Khalis Eberhart — were recently killed by accidental gunshots. “When the pandemic arrived, the number of people asking for authorization to carry a possession increased a lot. People are buying weapons without receiving the proper training.”
Police are having a hard time intervening. Battered by growing youth violence, large cities like Chicago invest millions in intervention programs to contain violence, in youth leadership training groups and community organizations.
Meadows held a course in South Fulton in December on the safe use of guns, attended by 50 fathers and mothers, some accompanied by their children. The next day, a three-year-old boy was injured when he found a revolver under his bed and shot himself in the stomach.
Much of the violence takes place in a few dozen major American cities, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Their list is topped by Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston and Milwaukee, but few places are free from the scourge. In Sedalia, a town of 22,000 in Missouri, Andre Walker, 4, was fatally shot at home when he found the family’s revolver. D’Shaunti Kyanni Hunter, 17, was found shot to death in a rural Georgia cemetery.
After a gunman killed four teenagers at Oxford High School in Michigan, the local prosecutor indicted the parents of the 15-year-old suspect with involuntary manslaughter. He accused them of buying the gun as a Christmas present and making it available for the young man in an unlocked bedroom drawer, even after the school board had warned them about his son’s violent fantasies. The parents claim innocence.
In most cases, however, adult gun owners are not criminally charged when they are used in shootings that kill children and teenagers. Some families say they are frustrated that the violence — which disproportionately affects more blacks and Hispanics in poor neighborhoods — doesn’t seem to cause more widespread concern. “It’s like it’s normal,” says Kim Sipes, whose 16-year-old nephew Ramon Sosa was shot dead with his grandmother in Oklahoma City last year.
A boy who was also 16 years old was charged with the crime, reflecting the fact that the number of young people as young as 19 who commit homicides has risen by nearly 20% between 2019 and 2020, according to the FBI.
Sipes wants Oklahoma lawmakers to pass laws preventing 16-year-olds from having access to firearms, but he has little hope that the killings will motivate lawmakers to act. A website his family created to raise funds to cover funeral costs struggled to raise a third of the intended $10,000.
Researchers say public health bodies and schools struggling after two years of the pandemic are failing to tackle the roots of the current increase in violence against children. “We were hoping that when life returned to normal, things would go back to the way they were,” says Sarah Burd-Sharps, director of research at Everytown for Gun Safety, an organization funded by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “But it’s already clear that this is not happening.”
Instead, anti-violence activists say, a sense of helplessness and anger has taken root in the country.
A recent count by the Giffords Community Violence Initiative found that 15 states pledged to invest nearly $700 million in preventing gun violence. The pandemic has halted many of these programs, and cities are now struggling to catch up.
“It’s an absolute crisis,” says Erica Atwood, director of Philadelphia’s department of criminal justice and public safety initiatives. According to the Gun Violence Archive, more than 30 children and teenagers died in shootings across the city in 2021. In Columbus, Ohio, activists say the chaotic explosion of gun violence against children is leaving entire neighborhoods in shock — and children afraid to walk down the street. bus stop home.
In 2019, three under 17s were shot dead. The number rose to 20 in 2020 and 17 last year, according to police figures.
Families who have lost children are starting to organize themselves to demand action from the police and community leaders. Mothers march wearing orange T-shirts and waving posters with pictures of their slaughtered children. They were going to a vigil when there was a shooting at the same location as a murder in the middle of last year.
In Columbus, 2021 began with the murder of two children. On New Year’s Day, Ava Williams, 9, and her sister Alyse, 6, were shot dead by their father, who had spent the pandemic periodically unemployed and hoarding weapons. “I was worried about Covid,” said the girls’ mother, Vanecia Kirkland. “I should have worried about their father.”
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