Guns, kids, and the pandemic
Tonight I was honored to talk to a few hundred people on a slide deck that I titled: “The intersection of two epidemics in the United States: COVID19 and firearms”. Thought some of you may be interested in some of the high-level epidemiology I discussed. This post focuses on children, specifically.
Children intersect with firearms in the United States more often than you may think. 48% of children live in a household with a firearm, which has stayed relatively stable for the past 15 years. More than 4 million kids live in a household with an unlocked, loaded weapon.
Why is this a problem? Guns in the home increases the risk of unintentional and intentional injury and death, especially among kids and among those in toxic relationships. In 2019, firearms claimed 40,000 Americans (in general) and this number is rising.
Unintentional firearm injuries
Unintentional injuries is the number one cause of death among young adults and children. This is an umbrella term for a multitude of causes, like suffocation (especially among those under 1), drowning (especially among African Americans), and motor vehicle accidents, just to name a few.
Firearms don’t make up a large proportion of unintentional injuries among children, but it does still happen. Firearm reaches the top ten causes of unintentional death for those aged 1-4 years old, and 10+ years old. These deaths are typically an unfortunate result of unsafe gun storage. Unintentional firearm deaths are usually a result of curiosity (e.g. kid looking down a gun barrel) or play (e.g. playing with friends).
Intentional firearm injuries
And then there are intentional death, including homicide and suicide. Many Americans think of gun violence as school shootings, since these incidents are covered in-depth by the media. But those incidents only account for a relatively small proportion of annual, intentional firearm deaths. Among children less than 1 years old, 20% of homicides were from a firearm. This increases incrementally with age. Among kids 15-19 years old, 93% homicides are from a firearm.
We see the same with suicide. Among children aged 10-14 years that died of suicide, 35% were with a firearm. More than 80% of victims used a firearm belonging to a family member, usually a parent. This percentage also increases with age.
Secondary Exposure
Kids are also exposed to gun violence. In other words, they witness it. This can seem like a smaller problem, but exposure to violence at a young age has detrimental effects later in life, due to distributions in the developing brain. I could talk about this for hours. Maybe for a later post.
Impact from the pandemic
We are still understanding the full impact of the pandemic on firearm injuries and death, but we have some preliminary data.
The pandemic (and an election year) had an interesting impact on firearm sales. In fact, 2020 (and now 2021) have the highest rate of firearm background checks. Ever.
What impact has this had on firearm death and injury? We are still gathering data. In fact, we only have half of 2020 data so far. Suicides continued to decrease from the previous year. You can see my previous post here regarding why.
For firearm injuries (intentional and unintentional), it looks like a slow uptick is starting to happen. But we are anxiously waiting for Q3 and Q4 data to come in to see if this is a “true” trend. Nonetheless, very interesting.
What are researchers doing about it?
Well, excitingly, for the first time in decades, 16 research teams were funded by the CDC to tackle gun violence (go here if you’re wondering why we haven’t had gun violence research in decades). The projects were just announced last month. I can talk about these projects in a later post too.
Love,
YL (violence) E
PS I would like to thank some of my rock star PhD students for helping me pull together this data! Also, one of my followers who specializes in disaster management and focuses on guns and mass shootings from an emergency management perspective.