Gun violence against America’s children keeps getting worse

Just a week ago last Sunday afternoon, a bullet grazed the head of a 7-year-old boy during a drive-by shooting in Garfield Park.

About a half an hour later that same day, a 13-year-old boy was shot in the abdomen while he was on a Near West Side street.

Two of the three men who were with the younger boy were shot in the head and died — a horrific scene that will likely haunt the minor as well as the 38-year-old man who survived his wounds.

The 7-year-old and the 13-year-old boy, should he pull through, may endure long-lasting physical and emotional trauma, but in spite of their devastating pain, they can count themselves lucky. Those less fortunate, like 16-year-old Demarjay Branch, who was shot just a day before in Austin, leave behind grieving loved ones as they join the growing number of American children killed by gun violence.

Gun-related homicides and suicides and accidental shootings have been the leading causes of death of American children since 2020, surpassing motor vehicles accidents, data has shown. Related, subsequent research keeps revealing these tragic incidents are only increasing. When the lens is zoomed out further back in time, it is even more glaring how much the epidemic has gotten out of control.

Firearm fatalities among children under 18 increased nationally 87% within a decade from 1,311 in 2011 to 2,590 in 2021, according to a study published last week in Pediatrics, a journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Chicago has been heading in the same unfortunate direction. Children in our city were dying from gun violence at a rate three times higher in 2021 than the year before, the Sun-Times’ Tom Schuba reported at the time.

There were 65 children — 17 and younger — killed in gun-related homicides in Chicago in 2022, Sun-Times data shows.

And 51 of the 53 homicides involving children so far this year have been shootings.

Adults must care enough to take action

Firearms aren’t the only rising threat endangering the lives of American kids, the research in Pediatrics found: Deadly drug poisonings among children jumped 133.3%, and suffocations also increased by 12.5% during this same 10-year period.

When weapons or controlled substances are easily accessible — something adults, if they care enough, can prevent — children are virtually certain to die.

The Boston Children’s Hospital researchers pointed out that nonfatal injuries, including those caused by car crashes, declined, in part, because effective public health interventions targeting pediatric safety have been paired with the push for improved technology and laws to keep these incidents from causing more harm.

That urgency to protect children from gunfire and drug poisonings just isn’t as strong.

“.... Yet, despite the progress in reducing most nonfatal injuries, the trends in increasing nonfatal firearm and poisoning injuries defy the overall trend in nonfatal injuries, in part because public health legislative support has lagged in these critical injury mechanisms,” the study concludes.

When it comes to gun violence claiming the lives of young Americans, all some elected leaders care to do is offer their thoughts and prayers. They refuse to take substantive action and promise to end the carnage by enacting gun legislation to restrict deadly firearms.

Eleven years after the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, more children died in another horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas last year. Most Americans paid attention to those tragedies, prompting renewed calls for tougher gun safety laws.

In between, and since Uvalde, other children have been killed. The headlines didn’t grab as much attention, but the shootings were no less heartbreaking.

And yet, America keeps going backward. The numbers keep rising.

It is a crisis we, as a nation, cannot ignore. And it is a crisis that is uniquely ours, as no other nation that is as large or as wealthy as ours has nearly as many children losing their lives to guns.

More children will continue to die, and study after study will confirm the degree of the problem, until those with the power to act make a concerted effort to finally end the bloodshed.

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