SOLVING GUN VIOLENCE REQUIRES A DIFFERENT LENS
Since the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, gun safety advocates, national news outlets and public officials from city councils to the White House have repeated the claim that gun violence has overtaken car accidents to become the leading cause of death for school-aged children in the United States. But according to CDC data, this is only true for Black children. Even then, gun violence is more prevalent among at-risk teenagers in certain historically segregated neighborhoods.
For Black teenage males, gun violence has been the leading cause of death for the entire decade before the spike in homicides during the pandemic. The leading cause of death in children of every other race has been, and still is, car accidents.
While we’ve seen a sharp increase in gun violence since the pandemic, the increase has been disproportionate. The biggest increases have been in communities that were already struggling with gun violence.
It is admittedly a difficult task for people to fairly address the issue of violence in these communities. It can be easy to simply link being Black to being a risk factor for gun violence without looking beyond race into historical and contemporary systemic factors.
Black urban violence prevention activists and scholars have spoken about feeling excluded from the discussion by prominent gun safety legislation advocates and government leaders for more than a decade.
The concept of intersectionality gives weight to the idea that individuals or groups may be experiencing oppression in a unique way that is related to several different layers of their identity — for example, being Black, a woman, a member of the LGBTQ+ community, having a disability and more. Theoretical frameworks like intersectionality can be indispensable tools for looking beyond raw data and better understanding how systemic factors lead to widespread public health inequities.
A group of researchers at Johns Hopkins University did a study of non-fatal shootings in Baltimore neighborhoods. The study went beyond race and divided neighborhoods based on historical and contemporary disinvestment and disadvantage. The researchers found that not all Black teenagers are equally at risk of gun violence and the greatest risk is for those in neighborhoods with sustained disadvantage — meaning neighborhoods that experienced both historical redlining practices and contemporary socioeconomic disadvantage had higher rates of gun violence than neighborhoods that only experience one or the other.
If we don’t explicitly address which children are being harmed by gun violence at the highest rates, we won’t be able to focus on investing in the communities that need the most help. We need to focus on interventions that research has shown is effective in promoting equity and reducing violence and disinvestment in the communities these children live in.
It isn’t easy to talk about racism. And it most certainly isn’t easy to talk about solutions to gun violence in a nation that has more guns than it does people, and where people overlook how many people of color have been swept up into an overburdened criminal justice system because of inconsistent gun laws.
But we need to keep talking about these issues, because regardless of what race they are, too many children are losing their lives daily to a form of violence that we have the ability to save them from.