Guns remain the leading cause of death for kids in the US

For a third year in a row, firearms ranked as the leading cause of death of American children and teens, according to a new report.

The report also showed that the majority of those gun deaths were homicides.

“In the U.S., gun death rates in this age group have increased by 106 percent since 2013 and have been the leading cause of death among this group since 2020,” the report’s authors at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions said in a news release.

Gun violence accounted for over 48,204 deaths in the U.S. in 2022, and over 2,500 of those were children and teens between the ages of 1 and 17, according to the data culled by the CDC.

“Gun death rates doubled from 2013 to 2022 for children and teens (ages 1–17),” according to the report. “In 2022, nearly three times as many teens (ages 10–17) died by gun homicide compared to 2013, increasing from 541 in 2013 to 1,486 in 2022.”

The overall total was only slightly down from 2021’s total of 48,830. That total was “a near three-decade high,” according to an advisory issued by U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy when he declared gun violence a “public health crisis” in the U.S.

In addition, the 2022 total included over 27,000 suicides, an all-time high.

The report also noted what it called “troubling trends” regarding demographics vulnerable to gun violence, noting disproportionately high numbers of youth gun deaths in the Black and Latino communities. The homicide rate of Black children and teens is 18 times higher than white children and teens. For Latinos, the total is more than three times higher than whites.

According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have also been 28 school shootings resulting in injury or death in the U.S. in 2024 and 389 mass shootings overall.