Young adults ages 18 and 19, along with gang-related shootings and suicide, not school shootings, account for most of the gun deaths attributed to people under the age of 20. Photo courtesy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
A European friend approached me today, asking about guns in the US, saying, “There are so many guns in your country. It will take a long time to collect them all and get rid of them.” She was shocked when I responded, “We don’t want to get rid of them.”
After she got over her immediate horror and confusion, she asked, “But aren’t you afraid of school shootings?” I said that I was not, while also making it clear that I opposed them. “Most Americans are against school shootings,” I added.
Then she said, “I read that school shootings are the number one cause of death of children in the US.”
I responded, “I believe you believe you read that, but you didn’t. No one is actually making that claim. Mainstream media and anti-gun lobbies are playing with statistics to make you think that is what you read.”
This or similar statements about school shooting deaths are now repeated constantly, not only in personal conversations but also on television talk shows and in the talking points of the anti-gun lobby. The claim, of course, is complete nonsense.
On average, school shootings result in fewer than 40 deaths per year, and not all of the victims are children. There was an uptick during the Biden administration and after COVID, but from 2000 through roughly 2020, the average was closer to six deaths per year.
And this is why no serious authority has actually made such an egregious claim. Rather, headlines are designed to make people believe that is what they read. The actual claim, according to CDC data, is that firearm injuries were the leading cause of death among children and teens ages 1 to 19 in 2020 and 2021.
There was a tremendous increase in shootings during the COVID lockdowns; at the same time, fewer people were driving to school and work. Consequently, 2020 was the first year guns killed more young people than cars.
The first problem with this data is that it is no longer true. It was true five years ago, but is still cited as if it were current. Second, ages 1 to 19 are an odd population to sample. Children are generally considered to be ages 0 to 17, while 18- and 19-year-olds are legally adults.
Furthermore, the firearm deaths include everything from suicide and homicide to accidents and gang violence, and the deaths are heavily skewed toward 18- and 19-year-olds. Teens ages 18 and 19 have a firearm mortality rate of 25.2 per 100,000. Children ages 1 to 17 have a rate of 3.7 per 100,000, nearly a 7-to-1 ratio.
There were 2,526 gun deaths in 2022 among children ages 1 to 17. The CDC’s broader 1-to-19 figure for the same year was approximately 4,400. That means 18- and 19-year-olds accounted for roughly 1,900 of the 4,400 deaths, nearly 43% of the entire figure, despite representing only two years out of the 19-year age range being sampled.
The death rate also varies dramatically by race. According to a Johns Hopkins University report, “In 2022, in the 1 to 17 age group, Black children and teens had a gun death rate 18 times higher than that of white children in the same age group.”
To put the numbers in perspective, more than 20,000 children die each year in the US from all causes combined, meaning firearm deaths represent only a percentage of total child mortality. When people hear the claim that gun deaths were the leading cause of death, many assume that means guns accounted for more than 50% of deaths. In reality, “leading cause” simply means the single largest category among many competing causes, including car accidents, poisoning, suffocation, drowning, fire-related injuries, and influenza and pneumonia.
Mass shootings are a rounding error among gun deaths in the under-20 age group. Suicide is the dominant driver, and gang-related shootings are second. Gang-related crime data, like demographic crime data broadly, is difficult to obtain because it challenges prevailing political narratives. The FBI’s NIBRS system depends on voluntary local reporting, and many high-gang jurisdictions under-report or classify gang homicides differently, leaving no unified federal gang homicide count broken down by victim age. That gap is not an accident.
What can be stated with certainty: 18- and 19-year-olds account for more than 40% of all gun deaths in the CDC’s 1–19 age bracket — a cohort that is legal adults by every measure and statistically more likely to be involved in gang activity than younger teens. Gang-related homicides averaged nearly 2,000 annually from 2007 to 2012, representing roughly 13% of all homicides nationally. In urban areas, the DOJ’s National Gang Center puts the share of gun homicides linked to gang and drug activity at 15% to 33%.
The anti-gun lobby frames child gun deaths as a suburban school shooting crisis requiring universal gun control. The data shows a different problem, an urban gang homicide problem concentrated in a small number of cities among a specific demographic. Those are not the same policy problem and do not have the same policy solution. Bundling them into a single “children are dying” statistic is a deliberate statistical manipulation.
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