The devastating news emerging from the Covenant School in Nashville resurfaced many troubling facts about America’s exceptional propensity for gun violence. But perhaps one of the most disturbing is that firearms are now the leading cause of death among Americans ages 24 years and under.
While guns have long been a fixture of American life, the emergence of firearms as the leading killer of young people is a relatively new phenomenon.
For years, cars held that distinction. But over the past two decades, motor vehicular deaths involving Americans between the ages of 1 and 24 plummeted, cutting the rate by nearly half. And sometime in the late 2010s, those two lines — deaths by car and by firearm — crossed paths on the graph of leading causes of death for young people.
In 2020, the most recent year for which data was available, firearms killed 10,186 young people, the highest number in two decades.
(It’s worth noting that motor vehicular deaths increased in 2020, the first year of the pandemic. That said, firearms also saw a jump, and remained the biggest cause of death for young people.)
Based on a 2022 analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), the chart on one level tells a tragic story: lives taken too soon. But it also highlights how policy action can move the needle on saving lives — and how policy neglect can deepen a preventable tragedy. The article received some initial attention when first published in April 2022, but its findings have reemerged in various American media outlets following the 2022 shooting in Uvalde, Texas. It’s easy to see why the comparison is striking a chord: The youngest members of our society are dying from the most…
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