New data shows the deadly impact of gun violence on children

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• Judy Woodruff:

  We are not even four full months into this year, and it has already been a deadly one for too many children and teens; 500 have lost their lives to gun violence in the U.S. so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

  Amna Nawaz looks at a sobering new analysis of related data that underscores just how big a problem we have.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Judy, in 2016, researchers at the University of Michigan found firearm-related injuries were the second leading cause of death among American children, behind only car crashes.

  In the years that followed, that gap narrowed. And, in 2020, gun deaths soared past motor vehicle accidents to become the leading cause of death for 1-to-19-year-olds in the United States.

  Joining me now to talk about those updated numbers is Dr. Patrick Carter. He is the co-director of the Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention at the University of Michigan and one of the authors of that analysis.

  Dr. Carter, welcome to the "NewsHour." And thank you for joining us.

  Dr. Patrick Carter, Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention, University of Michigan: Thank you for having me.

• Amna Nawaz:

  So let's just talk about these findings. As you were running these numbers that we should mention came from the CDC, what stood out to you, were you surprised by that increase?

• Dr. Patrick Carter:

  Well, I think we were expecting to see an increase because we have been seeing this trend, this increase since 2013 in the number of firearm deaths that are occurring among children and teens.

  What struck — what stuck to me was the magnitude of the increase. So, among the general population, we saw about a 14 percent increase in firearm deaths nationwide. But among children and teens between the ages of 1 to 19, that rate actually doubled. It was about 30 percent higher. So that's a significant increase from the prior year.

• Amna Nawaz:

  What should we understand about that? What are we talking about when it comes to gun violence?

  Because, obviously, a lot of people pay attention to the kinds of videos that ended up getting a lot of attention, for example, a recent one in Charleston, South Carolina, at a little league game, where shots ring out, and kids are ducking for cover. I think, in this incident, luckily, no one was injured.

  But are those the kinds of incidents we're talking about driving that increase?

• Dr. Patrick Carter:

  Well, and those incidents are horrific, to be sure, and they should garner attention, and we should work on trying to help prevent those types of incidents.

  But they don't represent the majority of these types of deaths. About 65 percent of the deaths that we see among children and teens are due to homicide, and about 30 percent are due to suicide. And those are daily deaths that are occurring, not due to these sort of mass shooter events or active shooter incidents.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Dr. Carter, I hear you saying teens quite a bit.

  Are we mostly talking about the older end of that 1-to-19-year spectrum? And also, demographically, geographically, is most of the violence occurring in the same places?

• Dr. Patrick Carter:

  Well, what we do know about these types of deaths is that they occur equally in rural communities, suburban communities, and urban communities.

  And in this past year, we saw increases in all those types of firearm deaths among those communities. We know that the deaths are a little bit different in those different communities. So,among rural and suburban settings, we tend to see more firearm suicides and unintentional injuries. And in urban communities, we tend to see more firearm homicides due to interpersonal violence.

  But we know that they occur at equal rates among all those types of communities. So, this is really a problem that affects every American in every type of community.

  And when we talk about teens, we do see a greater number of firearm injuries that occur among that adolescent age, as they get — start to get into those teenage years, although we still see a fair number of unintentional injuries among the younger age group.

• Amna Nawaz:

  So we mentioned that comparison with motor vehicle deaths.

  We should note it was decades that motor vehicle crashes were the leading cause of death, right? And that — those have been steadily declining since 2001. So I guess the question is, how did we do that? How did we get those to come down, and why can't we do the same with firearms?

• Dr. Patrick Carter:

  That's a great question.

  And it's really the comparison between the two and what we have been able to do with motor vehicle crash deaths and not been able to do with firearm deaths. So we have seen over the past half-a-century that we have been able to decrease motor vehicle crash injury and death, largely due to evidence-based research.

  We have made cars safer. We have made roads safer. We have changed driver behavior around drinking and driving. We have learned to train our teens how to drive better, when we know that that's a high-risk time for them to get into a crash. We have phased out driving among elderly drivers who are no longer capable of having the skills to drive.

  We have applied evidence-based research to all angles of this problem, and been able to markedly decrease the number of people dying from a motor vehicle crash. That's a science of injury prevention.

  We can do the same thing with firearms. We just hadn't been able to do it until most recently, when the federal government has started to fund this type of research to look at this problem and understand what the drivers of it are, and then also what the solutions are.

  They don't involve taking away people's guns. They involve applying injury science to figure out how we reduce the potential for harm and allow people to still have legal firearm ownership. We reduced those deaths from motor vehicle crash without taking cars off the road. In fact, we have more people driving today than we ever have.

• Amna Nawaz:

  The numbers are so striking. The headline is so stunning and disturbing. But we should note this is data from 2020.

  Do you have any reason to believe the numbers have trended down since then?

• Dr. Patrick Carter:

  I don't.

  So, the data lags a little bit behind because this is death data. So it has to be collected across the country. And then we have seen this increased trend since 2013. And I expect that, unless we're able to develop some of these solutions that I have been talking about, we're going to continue to see those numbers increase.

  And so that's the work that we have to do.

• Amna Nawaz:

  That is Dr. Patrick Carter from the Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention at the University of Michigan.

  Dr. Carter, thank you for your time.

• Dr. Patrick Carter:

  Thank you.