Read this and cry. I'm posting this piece from today's Washington Post not because I didn't think we had a crisis, but rather because I suspect that you, like me, don't know that children's deaths due to gun violence are THIS frequent.
I can only imagine just how difficult it was for Cox, Davies, Johnson and Thebault to research and write this news story. However painful, without question, these stories must be told and heard lest their deaths—lives cut tragically short—be in vain.
From a policy perspective, without this level of awareness, we're driving blindly. It's beyond sad that our country cares more about guns than gun violence.
-Angela Valenzuela
In America, a Child is Shot Every Hour, and Hundreds Die. Here are 13 Young Lives Lost in 2021
The country’s gun violence epidemic is
killing more children than ever. Who they
were matters just as much as how they died.
The sisters in Ohio, both in elementary school, were shot by their father. The boy in Texas was shot at home by someone in a passing a car. The ninth-grader in Arkansas was shot at school by a friend. The girl in Kansas was shot by a toddler, who didn’t mean to do it. The teenager in South Carolina shot himself, but he did mean to do it.
All of them were killed in an epidemic unique to the United States, where, on average, at least one child is shot every hour of every day. Many survive, but many others do not. In the nation’s capital, nine children were killed in gun homicides last year. In Los Angeles, 11 were fatally shot. In Philadelphia: 36. In Chicago: 59. Those figures don’t include the hundreds of other kids who died in accidental shootings and by suicide.
Just how many were taken by gun violence last year will remain unknown until the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention releases its data months from now. But in 2020, the number exceeded 2,200 — by far the highest total in the past two decades — and 2021′s tally is expected to be worse.
The children featured below are broadly representative of those killed every year in America. Even babies are shot to death, but the vast majority of young victims are teenagers. Black kids are more than four times as likely to die in shootings as White ones, according to CDC data, though White kids are much more likely to use guns to take their own lives.
Often, children killed by bullets are memorialized only by brief news reports or anguished obituaries. But the way they lived matters as much as the way they died.
The 13 children profiled here were funny: the 6-year-old who wanted to be a doctor so she could give shots to all the doctors who had given her shots. They were generous: the 12-year-old who used his chore money to take his family out to McDonald’s. And they were ambitious: the 15-year-old who wanted to be a nuclear physicist.
These are their stories, one for each month of a violent year.
No comments:
Post a Comment