While gun violence has been a leading cause of death for children in the United States for years, the COVID-19 pandemic has skyrocketed it while widening racial disparities.
In the years leading up to the pandemic – from 2015 to early 2020 – black children were shot 27 times more often than white children in four major US cities. But from 2020 to the end of 2021, black children were shot 100 times more often than white children, according to a
new study in JAMA Network Open
. The study examined gun attack data from New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia.
The study also found that Hispanic children were about 26 times more likely to be shot than white children during the pandemic, versus a relative risk of 8.6 times before the health emergency. And Asian children were about four times more likely to be shot than white children, up from a relative risk of 1.4 times before the pandemic.
While the rate of gunshots among white children did not change during the pandemic, the public health emergency was associated with a doubling of gun injuries among children overall. That’s 503.5 more gunshot wounds than without the pandemic, the Boston University study authors estimated
Firearm injuries have been on the rise for years before the pandemic. But in 2020, they became the top killers of US children, surpassing car accidents and cancer. The increases have continued into 2021, according to the new analysis.
While the evidence isn’t clear as to why the pandemic has led to more gun violence and racial disparities, the authors of the new study play the hypothesis that community context plays a role.
“Our findings are broadly consistent with research identifying greater increases in pandemic-related violence in neighborhoods with less racial and economic privilege,” the researchers wrote. “Possible explanations include COVID-19 exacerbating inequalities in access to health, employment and education resources.”
Following last year’s Robb Elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas – which killed 21 people, including 19 students between the ages of 7 and 10 – medical associations have again called for common sense and evidence-based strategies to reduce injuries and deaths through guns in children. These included universal background checks, bans on those convicted of domestic violence from owning guns, licensing laws, restrictions on carrying concealed firearms in public, gun safety education, and assault weapon restrictions.
“As physicians, our mission is to heal and maintain health. But too often the wounds we see in America today resemble the wounds I saw in the war,” Gerald Harmon, president of the American Medical Association, said in a statement to the Times. The AMA declared gun violence a public health crisis in 2016.
The President of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Moira Szilagyi, also advocated doing more to address the public health crisis. “When are we going to stand up as a nation for all these children? Eventually what will it take for our leaders to do something meaningful to protect them?” she wrote in a statement. “The AAP has called on the federal government to increase funding for gun violence prevention research and sensible laws that protect everyone in a community.”
The authors of the new study also call for efforts to “target structural racism as a fundamental driver of the US gun violence epidemic.”
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