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More than 2,500 children and teens between the ages of one and 17 died by a firearm in 2022, according to a new report published on Thursday.
Firearms were the leading cause of death for children and teenagers in the United States for the third consecutive year, with homicides accounting for the majority of gun deaths among the age group, a new report found.
The report — published Thursday by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions — analyzed the latest data on gun violence from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which revealed that more than 48,000 people across the country died from gun violence in 2022. Of those deaths, over 2,500 children and teens between the ages of one and 17 died by a firearm.
“In the U.S., gun death rates in this age group have increased by 106 percent since 2013 and have been the leading cause of death among this group since 2020,” the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions said in a news release.
The report underscores the rapid increase of gun violence in the U.S. in recent years and its impact on youth. Health officials, including Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, have called gun violence a “public health crisis” that is the leading cause of premature death for Americans.
The rate of firearm-related deaths “reached a near three-decade high in 2021,” an advisory on gun violence issued by Murthy in June said. There were 48,830 gun-related deaths in the U.S. in 2021, according to the CDC.
The second-highest total of gun deaths ever recorded was in 2022, when 48,204 people died from gun-related injuries, the report noted. It added that those deaths included more than 27,000 suicides — marking an all-time high for the country.
The high death toll shows that “troubling trends” still persist among vulnerable demographic groups, including growing disparities across different racial and ethnic groups such as Black and Latino youth, according to the report.
