State is more than double US average
In Memphis, and across the state of Tennessee, children are dying as a result of gunshot wounds at a higher rate than the rest of the country.
Weapons-related fatalities in minors, according to research compiled by Lebonheur Children’s Hospital and The University of Tennessee Health Science Center, show that weapons-related deaths in Tennessee are more than double the national average.
A finer point was put on the statistic last week in Memphis, when three children were killed in back-to-back shootings. Memphis police said both were likely drive-by shootings.
Lequan Boyd, 16, Ashlynn Luckett, 6, and Jadon Knox, 10, all died within 48 hours. Jadon and Ashlynn died at Lebonheur. Lequan died across the street from the children’s hospital at Regional One Hospital.
The spate of violence against the youths prompted public memorials, multiple Gofundme fundraisers for funeral expenses and reignited conversations about community violence.
But for the staff at Lebonheur, the conversation has been ongoing. It has to, said Lebonheur’s Medical Director of Trauma Medicine, Dr. Regan Williams, because she, and other trauma-care professionals are seeing too many children come through the doors of the hospital’s emergency department with bullet holes in their small bodies.
Doctors train to treat the sick, but now they find themselves in another role
“We really do want to help decrease violence, we really do. But finding the right way to go about it is hard,” Williams said.
She’s quick to add, “But still, doing something is better than doing nothing.”
Williams said she didn’t expect her career in medicine would one day include intensive research that tabulated all the ways in which children are injured and killed by gunfire.
She also did not expect it would include tourniquet training sessions for community members or making trips to the state capital to ask lawmakers to intervene in Tennessee’s child homicide crisis. But one after another, children were rushed through Lebonheur’s emergency department with gunshot wounds. Not all of these children die, but many, Williams said, carry irreversible physical and mental wounds.
So Williams, along with members of the Tennessee division of the Children’s Hospital Association, will pair with the Tennessee Commission for Children and Youth this legislative session.
“We reached out to them (the Tennessee Commission for Children and Youth) for help with firearm injuries, because children’s hospitals across the state are seeing this increase in firearm injuries,” Williams said. “They’re putting together our caucus, just to talk about these injuries.”
It’s too early to know what, if any, specific laws the caucus comprised of medical professionals will address with Tennessee lawmakers.
Law enforcement, specifically Memphis Police Department Director Michael Rallings, has gone on record several times about one law in particular — a 2014 law that allows most Tennesseeans
to keep a loaded gun in their car, even without a permit.
“If I could repeal one law,” Rallings told the Commercial Appeal in 2016 and several times since then, “that’s the one I’d focus on.”
Since the law went into effect in 2014, approximately 4,178 guns were stolen out of cars in Memphis between 2014 and 2018, according to MPD data. In 2017 alone, 1,214 guns were stolen from cars.
Child homicides are climbing
According to statistics compiled by the Tennessee Department of Health, the number of children killed by gunfire, in both self-inflicted and homicidal acts, has been on the rise.
“When I rotated here as a resident, we just didn’t really see firearm injuries that much,” said Williams. Her residency was from 2004 until 2011.
By 2015, 70 children in Tennessee were killed by firearms. In 2016, the total rose to 79. Later, by 2017, the number jumped to 102. It was that year, that Williams decided to look more closely beyond the single statistic.
“We really needed to look at how children were getting shot, so we reviewed all of the firearm injuries in children treated at Lebonheur, from 2014 until 2018,” Williams said.
Because a social worker sees every patient with a firearm injury at Lebonheur, they were able to get more granular data. Once the data was broken down, Williams said a clearer picture began to develop — one that revealed two distinct areas of focus that Lebonheur wanted to address.
“We divided that data into accidental and intentional, and found it was about 50-50, which I was surprised to learn,” Williams said.
In cases of accidental shootings, about 70 percent of those were incidents of family members or friends shooting a child.
“Which, to me, that means it’s 100 percent about gun storage,” Williams said, noting that accidental shootings are primarily affecting white, privately insured children. Intentional firearms injuries, however, can’t be linked as easily to a specific solution.
“The shootings that are intentional,” Williams said, “most of those are driveby shootings. That really relates to community violence, so how do you curb community violence? Well, I think you have to work with people on the ground and in the communities.”
For now, working within communities for Lebonheur means hosting Stop the Bleed workshops, in which adults and children learn how to apply pressure to wounds or use tourniquets. It’s one measure, Williams said, but it can be a life-saving measure while victims wait for first-responders to arrive.
More holistic measures that aim to address underlying causes of community violence will need community buy-in, Williams said. Hospital staffers and police can’t do the job alone.
The intentional acts that results in firearm deaths disproportionately affect African-american children in Memphis.
“They account for 73 percent of those intentional injuries, so it’s aligned with the population, since our Africanamerican population is 63 percent (of Memphis), but it’s still higher,” Williams said. “It’s really interesting to me, the mayor’s response was great, right?” Williams asked, referring to the killings of Lequan, Ashlynn, and Jarod.
“He said, ‘Here’s all the things we’re doing,’ but it doesn’t feel like it’s enough. And I don’t think it can be just the mayor, it can’t just be the Memphis Police Department and it can’t just be Lebonheur. The whole community has got to get together and decide, ‘We want to protect our children, we want to give them good lives, and we want to get them off the street and we want to keep them safe.’ But until everyone can do that at the same time, I don’t know that we’re going to make really, really big improvements.”
“We really do want to help decrease violence, we really do. But finding the right way to go about it is hard.” Dr. Regan Williams
against existing nationally focused research.
Additionally, the epidemiologist for the state of Tennessee puts out a child injury report yearly. The last available report from the epidemiologist is for the year 2017, and 2018’s report will be published likely sometime in February.
Those combined research projects and reports found:
❚ In 2016, 5.3 Tennessee children per 100,000 were killed by guns. In 2017, that number jumped to 6.8 per 100,000. That last national average known, for the year 2016, was 2.2 children per 100,000. This includes accidental and intentional shootings.
❚ Firearms-related injuries are the number one external cause of death for children in Tennessee, jumping 29 percent from 2016 to 2017.
❚ The majority of firearms used in these shootings belong to a family member or friend.
❚ Of all the ways in which Tennessee children are killed by an object penetrating their bodies, firearms are the number one driver of fatal penetrating injuries at over 11 percent. The next highest category of external forces is motor vehicle traffic, which accounts for just over three percent.
❚ African-american children account for a disproportionate amount of child fatalities from firearm injuries in Tennessee.