Young victims, young suspects: shootings and gun violence in Kansas City

After this week's shooting in Kansas City during a parade celebrating the hometown Chiefs' Super Bowl victory, children struck by gunfire poured into Children's Mercy Hospital, less than a mile from Union Station, where the shooting took place.

“Fear,” the hospital's chief nurse, Stephanie Meyer, told reporters. “The only word I would use to describe what we saw and how they felt when they came to us was fear.”

On the other side of the guns were also young people, according to authorities who said Friday that two teenagers arrested in the aftermath of the shooting had been charged with “gun-related” crimes and with resisting arrest.

What had seemed like an attack on the parade itself turned out to be a much more common act of American violence: a dispute that ended in gunfire and in this case left one person dead and 22 people injured, about half was younger than last time. 16.

The shooting made news around the world because of where and when it happened. But in many ways the circumstances were all too familiar in a country where guns and gun violence are ubiquitous

“If the exact same thing happened at a gas station, in a neighborhood or in any other community, no one would talk about it,” said James Densley, a professor of criminal justice at Metro State University in Minnesota who studies youth violence.

Kansas City has endured much of that bloodshed. The city has one of the highest murder rates in the country and 182 people were killed last year, surpassing 2020's high figure. City officials say many of the killings were attributed to arguments, the same cause investigators cited in the shooting. during the Super Bowl parade.

That children were both victims and, according to authorities, perpetrators underlines what experts and data suggest is the disturbing ease with which young people can end up shooting someone, or being shot.

“Pushing and shoving escalates very quickly to shooting if weapons are present,” Mr Densley said. “And so there's a lot of conflict resolution, shall we say, or dispute resolution, that's being done through the barrel of a gun with these young people.”

Many policymakers breathed a sigh of relief when the country's preliminary homicide numbers showed a sharp decline in 2023, the second straight year of decline after a spike in violence during the pandemic.

However, the numbers remain well above pre-pandemic years, and even those numbers were higher than the number of annual homicides that occurred. rather last decade.

And there are indications that even as the overall number of fatal shootings falls, the number of incidents involving minors could rise.

According to incident reports from the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks shootings across the country, someone under the age of 18 has shot and killed another child somewhere in the United States on average once a day. The frequency has increased steadily over time, although it is difficult to say exactly how much because demographic data on suspects and victims in cases is sometimes incomplete.

Still, the trend is generally consistent with other data on children and gun violence. Gun violence became the norm in 2020 main cause According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, deaths among children and teens are higher than those from car accidents.

After peaking in 2021, firearm homicides among adults have fallen by more than 7 percent in 2022. But for children ages 12 to 17, the total rose 8 percent, according to data on causes of death published by the CDC.

Although the CDC has not yet released figures for 2023, data from the Gun Violence Archive suggests a similar pattern is continuing: an overall decline in gun deaths, but no decline in the number of young gun victims. And often children are among both the victims and the suspects.

Milwaukee is a city that has struggled with the problem of youth violence for years. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there were at least eight cases last year in which children allegedly fatally shot other children in the city.

On New Year's Day 2023, a 17-year-old was killed and two other people were injured in a shooting at a restaurant.

Three weeks later, a 14-year-old boy was killed and his 13-year-old brother injured while making a video.

And the killings there continued apace.

In March, a 15-year-old boy was fatally shot. Later that month, another 15-year-old boy was killed and five other people were injured when gunfire broke out during a fight in the street.

In total, 96 children have been killed in Milwaukee since 2020, up from 34 in the previous four years. Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission. Since the pandemic, children have made up more than 12 percent of the city's homicide victims, up from 7 percent in previous years, the commission's data shows, and the vast majority of cases involved guns.

The number of children suspected of murder has also tripled during the years of the pandemic compared to the previous period, the commission's data shows.

Children shooting children is not a phenomenon limited to big cities. According to the Gun Violence Archive, in Urbana, Illinois, three such incidents have occurred in one neighborhood since 2020. According to the nonprofit, three child-on-child gun homicides also occurred within a one-mile radius in Canton, Miss., during the same period.

Research among youth shows that the vast majority of teens who acquire and carry guns do so because they feel unsafe in their neighborhood. They believe – often rightly – that many other people carry guns.

“It's almost always that they're afraid,” said David Hemenway, a professor of health policy at Harvard who studies young people and gun violence. 'And why are they afraid? Because other kids have guns.”

And then he often asked a follow-up question.

“We say: what kind of world do you want to live in – where it's easy to get guns, hard to get guns or impossible to get guns? And an overwhelming majority want to live in a world where it's impossible for teens like them to get guns. Even those who carry guns illegally, the majority usually say we would like to live in a world where it is impossible for teenagers like us to get guns.”

Kevin Draper reporting contributed. Susan C. Beachy research contributed.