Guns and Youth - Deadly Assaults, Young, Armed, And Dangerous, Reductions In Youth Firearm Violence, Students And Guns

There was a time when feuds among teenage boys might end in nothing more dangerous than a fistfight. Unfortunately, during the 1980s and 1990s young people more often turned to guns to resolve disputes. Youth gangs and school shootings dominated news headlines. The peak decade was 1983–1993, when arrests of youths for serious violent offenses surged by 70%; the number of young people who murdered nearly tripled over the course of that decade. (See Figure 7.1.)

Rates of violence then declined, as is evident in downward trends in arrest records, victimization reports, and hospital emergency room records. Still, gunfire has been the second leading cause of death among young Americans since at least 1980, second only to motor vehicle accidents. Rates are especially high for adolescents. The nation marked an all-time high for gun deaths among people under age twenty in 1994, when 5,833 died, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

American children are twelve times more likely to fall victim to gun-related deaths than are children in the rest of the industrialized world. Even Israel and Northern Ireland, two nations noted for internal strife, have lower rates of child deaths due to gunfire, according to a 1997 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Table 7.1 shows that the death rate involving firearms among children up to age fourteen was 1.66 per one hundred thousand children in the United States, compared with 0.14 per one hundred thousand in twenty-five industrialized countries. The CDC report noted that homicide is the fourth leading cause of death among American children under age four and the third leading cause of death among five-to fourteen-year-olds. (Not all homicides involve firearms.) Statistics show that one child aged between zero and fourteen is murdered with a gun on an average day in the United States.