Gun assault rates for kids doubled in Chicago, 3 other big cities during COVID pandemic, even worse for Black children, study finds

Rates of gun assaults on children roughly doubled during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a study that looked at gun deaths and injuries in Chicago and three other major cities.

Black children were the most frequent victims.

The analysis led by Boston University’s Jonathan Jay, who studies urban health, included a review of gun assaults between mid-March 2020 and December 2021 in Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and New York.

It found that Black children were 100 times as likely as white children to be victims of fatal and nonfatal shootings. Pre-pandemic, they were 27 times as likely. The researchers excluded accidental shootings and incidents of self-harm.

Jay said his team looked at the rates to understand whether some children are at higher risk than others.

“We knew that children of color, even before the pandemic, were more likely than non-Hispanic white children to be shot, and we also knew that child gun victimization seemed to be increasing during the pandemic,” Jay said. “But no one had looked at how racial disparities in child victimization might have been changing.”

The researchers are still unpacking pandemic-specific factors that might have driven the change, he said.

The influences they’re considering include “stress associated with job losses, school closings, loss of access to certain kinds of services that closed down,” he said. “Also, really visible police violence, especially against people of color. Loss of loved ones and family members to COVID-19 virus.”

In 2020, firearms became the leading cause of death for American children, surpassing car crashes for the first time in decades, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The National Institutes of Health estimates that 16.6 million U.S. adults purchased a gun in 2020, up from 13.8 million in 2019, according to its analysis of the National Firearms Survey.

“With COVID, we’ve seen an increase in gun purchases and more guns in the home,” said Dr. Joel Fein, a physician and co-director of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Center for Violence Prevention. “So [children] were in places where there were now more guns and probably more guns on the streets as well.”

In late March, the CDC released data showing there were, on average, 36% more emergency department visits every week for firearm injuries in 2021 than in 2019, with the largest increase among children 14 and younger.

This article is part of a partnership that includes WHYY, NPR and KFF Health News.