By Mike Males
Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has issued another “advisory” fixated on young people, this time on gun violence. Following his grandstanding on social media and teenagers, Murthy repeats (and re-repeats, and re-re-repeats) the popular mantra already voiced thousands of times by every top agency, pundit, and lobby: “Firearms are the leading cause of death for American children and adolescents.”
My question, also repeated: If you’re concerned about this tragic reality, wouldn’t the first step be finding out who is shooting them?
Murtha’s agonized rhetoric, like everyone else’s, doesn’t match the failure to confront that crucial question. He murmurs the usual insinuations… it’s just kids finding unsecured guns, suicidal adolescents, gangs, “children” shooting themselves and each other.
When a fact vital to confronting a serious problem is omitted year after year, it’s because no one important wants to know the answer.
The FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Report suggests why.
Of the appalling 8,557 firearms homicide victims under age 18 in the most recent decade tabulated, through 2020 – some 95%-plus of the entire gun toll of youths in the 750-million-population Western world – nearly two-thirds of the shooters are known. These are the ages of the known killers victimizing American children and adolescents in gun homicides:
Shooter under age 18: 20%
Shooter age 18-20: 25%
Shooter age 21-24: 15%
Shooter age 25 and older: 40%
On top of 8,557 gun murders of children and youth during the 2011-2020 decade, there were 5,959 gun suicides, 916 fatal gun accidents, 330 gun deaths in which intent could not be determined, and 89 shot to death by law enforcement; 15,851 gun fatalities total.
The single biggest reason guns are the leading cause of death among American children and adolescents is because American adults are shooting them.
Figure 1. Who’s shooting America’s children/youth? (all gun deaths, under age 18, 2011-2020).
America’s huge child-adolescent gun toll, nearly 16,000 shot to death in the last decade, is tragic, appalling. Now, the next shock.
It is also just a little over 4% of America’s total gun carnage (372,496 for all ages during that decade. Children and teens comprise 6% of gun homicides and fewer than 3% of gun suicides.
Digest that reality for a moment. It means the real problem is much worse and less politically palatable than all the evasive authorities loudly debating gun policy acknowledge.
To take any serious step to save “children’s” lives now lost to guns, we have to get guns out of the hands of American grownups and homes. No politician of any stripe wants to touch that.
Even in a period, 2011-20, that includes the Sandy Hook school massacre and other school shootings, more than half the shooters of children and youth are ages 21 and older – the age American authorities allow maximum gun privileges. A large share are 25 and older, the age of supposedly “mature,” “developed cerebral cortexes,” enjoying an absolute Second Amendment right courts and Congress affirm to just about any weaponry they desire.
What an American with mature brain development and full gun rights can do is almost limitless. One 64-year-old shot more people in Las Vegas in 10 minutes than have been shot in all 130,000 American schools in four years – yet another “no-fun fact” you’ll never see anywhere else.
One consequence of rampant lying to ourselves is that America’s gun slaughter keeps getting worse. Since 2020, gun deaths are up among all ages and appear headed for a record peak in 2023. Proposed gun-law reforms might reduce that toll somewhat – a welcome result – but would not seriously dent it. The chief policy reform gun-control groups have spend thousands of hours pursuing, raising the ages to buy and possess firearms, has repeatedly been shown to have no effect.
Even older adolescents always have had much lower gun suicide rates than every adult age. A 17-year-old is just half as likely to kill themselves with a gun, and much less likely to die by guns overall, than a 47-year-old grownup.
But because suicide is deeply stigmatized by American culture (including professionals, who should know better) as moral weakness, that fact has to be downplayed. Typically, it is masked with the scary-sounding but largely meaningless statement that “suicide is the second leading cause of death among adolescents.” That’s true only because teens rarely die from big killers like heart disease, cancer, or COVID. The wrong implication that teens have a high rate of suicide fooled even astute social critic/comedian George Carlin.
The White gun-death paradox
Finally, in another blunt fact that is acknowledges but rarely pursued, guns are the leading cause of death for only one fraction of children and adolescents: African Americans.
As Figure 1 shows, the rate of firearms death for 2020-2024 is 7 times higher among Black than White, and 17 times higher among Black than Asian, adolescents. There is no general pattern of child and teenage gun deaths, but one highly concentrated in younger ages for poorer people… but not for older ones.
Note that Whites are safer from gun death than Latinx up to age 30, and safer than Blacks up to age 55. Then, at older ages, Whites mysteriously become the most at risk. For the two richest demographics, White teens are safer from every type of gun violence than every older White adult age, and Asian teens have around the same rates as older adult ages.
Figure 2. African and Native Americans have high gun tolls at younger ages; Whites at older ages
These facts have huge implications for addressing these real tragedies. They mean that those who genuinely seek to confront gun violence first have to face socioeconomic disparities.
But this is getting into taboo areas, The escapism by authorities to stigmatize adolescents as the gun problem – just like Murthy’s effort to misrepresent social media as teens’ worst mental health concern – sabotages the comprehensive policies necessary to address America’s rising social epidemics.