Massacre of kids by firearm violence on city streets gets scant regard

Mass murder shocks us. Mass murder captures the nation’s attention. Mass murder stokes outrage. Mass murder inspires protest marches, angry speeches, occasionally a tepid bit of legislation.

The other kind of firearm slaughter, the kind of massacres that occur over days and weeks and months, the shootings that kill 1,300 American children a year, maim another 5,800 (according to a study published in the medical journal “Pediatrics”), would only be shocking in Europe or Australia or Japan or Canada — nations that lack our gunslinger mentality.

Here in the U.S., we shrug off child carnage as a mundane fact of life, a necessary sacrifice to the hallowed Second Amendment.

Last weekend, Naila Jones caught a bullet apparently intended for her mother in a neighborhood 45 miles south and a world away from the horrific Parkland school murders. The shooting death of a 4-year-old might seem horrific too, but the killing hardly stirred much reaction outside the Liberty City housing project where mothers train children to throw themselves to the floor when gunfire rents the night.

Perhaps, child shootings have become too commonplace thereabouts for the outside world to notice.

This was the same community where, in 2016, King Carter, age 6, had been playing with other children in the courtyard of his apartment complex, when a shootout erupted among rival gangbangers. King Carter died in the crossfire.

Kids are just so much collateral damage in the urban streets version of America’s gun culture. Tequila Forshee, 12, was killed as she sat on her couch, her grandmother braiding her hair, when five gunmen in pursuit of her uncle riddled their Miami Gardens home with bullets.

When gangbangers assassinated a teenager named Trammell Raymond Jr., in Liberty City, stray bullets wounded two kids, 12 and 13, inside a nearby house.

Police think it was a case of mistaken identity when gunmen killed 10-year-old Marlon Eason as he dribbled a basketball in his Overtown driveway.

“Bullets go flying everywhere around here,” 17-year-old Jewell Mosley told me after gangbangers sprayed a Liberty City corner using assault weapons. Six young people were wounded. Two died, including 15-year-old Isaiah Solomon.

Mosley, with her own toddler in tow, said, “You can get killed just standing on your porch, minding your own damn business.”

I wrote about all these kid killings. And others. I wrote about Jada Page, just 8, struck in the head by a bullet intended for her father. Hardly a peep from the readers. I got more reaction that year from columns on feral cats, the Zika scare, toxic algae. Wrong zip code, I guess.

In 2016, the Miami Herald counted more than 60 children and teens (and two babies) gunned down in Miami-Dade County over the previous 12-months. In the previous decade, 316 children were gunshot victims. So many, that community funeral homes began offering child-themed services to go with undersized coffins. Superheroes. Disney princesses. King Carter’s funeral suit was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles outfit. Tequila Forshee was buried wearing her Hello Kitty necklace and bracelet.

They were victims in the slow-mo massacre suffered in America’s poorest neighborhoods, where gunfire has become a nightly occurrence. I interviewed high school students in Liberty City who could discern, by sound, whether gunfire had come from an AK-47 or an AR-15.

Black children die from gun violence at a rate 10 times higher than their white counterparts, according to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That seems in inverse proportion to the scant attention we give young black murder victims compared to white kids.

Of course, we regularly shoot all sorts of children in all sorts of neighborhoods. Often by accident. A kid dies from an accidental shooting every other day in the United States, according to a collaborative investigative report published last fall by The Associated Press and USA Today.

The report, looking at more than 1,000 accidental child shootings between 2014 and the summer of 2016, found that “deaths and injuries spike for children under 5, with 3-year-olds the most common shooters and victims among young children.”

Consider that. Three-year-olds were the most common shooters. Three-year-olds were most common victim. AP and USA Today found that nearly 90 three-year-olds were killed or injured in the shootings. Most of the wounds were self-inflicted. Our annual toll of gunshot toddlers exceeds the very firearm homicide rate among all ages in the United Kingdom. With so many guns in our midst, firearm tragedies become a matter of the math. When private citizens in the U.S. own 310 million firearms, the mathematical probabilities dictate an annihilation of American children.

With so many assault weapons in circulation, teenage gangbangers are bound to get their hands on high-powered rifles. With so many guns in American homes, some awful percentage of children will happened across Daddy’s loaded pistol. And in gun-crazed America, such killings are hardly news.