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As students across the country returned to classrooms this fall, four Las Vegas teenagers returned to a court room to plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter for beating their classmate to death in a violent attack that was captured on video and shared on online.
Days later, police in Maryland said a 16-year-old who had been the “victim, witness or suspect” in 10 previous incidents shot and killed his classmate in the bathroom on his first day at school.
The following week, a Florida teen was charged with murder for stabbing his mother to death in what officials called a “cold-blooded murder” that took place less than two years after he was arrested, but never charged, for fatally shooting his father in Oklahoma.
Though murder and violent crime in the United States has decreased in recent years, homicides committed by children have risen dramatically, jumping 65% — from 315 in 2016 to 521 in 2022, according to a September report from the Council on Criminal Justice.
Mass killings by the shockingly young triggered national attention and scrutiny in recent months, like the massacre by a 14-year-old student at his rural Georgia high school, but the spike in homicides by young people is largely driven by more routine attacks.
Experts say an influx of firearms combined with residual impacts from the pandemic and threats on social media may be to blame.
During the pandemic, Americans bought tens of millions of guns, which may be easier to access than parents realize. Children lost access to key social supports and violence-prevention programs that can help reduce crime. And they spent more time online, where experts say threats and taunts can escalate into deadly offline conflict.
“The important issue here is any one of these things in isolation doesn’t have the impact,” said David Muhammad, executive director of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform. “But the combination of this horrible perfect storm of challenges all culminated to produce this overall increase in gun violence.”
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Kids and guns and more gun-related crimes
The number of crimes committed by children under 18 involving firearms and the number of victims seriously injured during such crimes increased by more than 20%, according to the Council on Criminal Justice report, which is drawn from data submitted by 3,484 of the country’s more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Incident-Based Reporting System.
The uptick in gun-related crime is notable, given that juvenile crime overall is down, including property crimes like burglary, larceny, and robbery, which saw the steepest declines from 2016 to 2022, according to the council report.
Gun sales have been steadily increasing over the past two decades, peaking at more than 21 million in 2020, according to The Trace, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that tracks gun violence. A report from the Education Department found the rate of student firearm possession in the 2021-2022 school year was higher than any other year in the previous decade.
“Youth access to firearms really just mirrors national access,” said Muhammad, the former chief probation officer of Alameda County in California.
ReportGuns remain leading cause of death for children and teens in the US
The amount and types of guns used by juvenile offenders could also be contributing to a higher victim count and more serious injuries, Muhammad said. He pointed to a recent mass shooting in Birmingham, Alabama, where a group of unidentified suspects opened fire with weapons modified with devices that can convert semiautomatic guns into automatic weapons, killing four and injuring 17 in a hail of bullets.
Brendan Lantz, coauthor of the Council on Criminal Justice report, said guns can quickly turn lesser crimes deadly and having millions more of any kind could help explain the increase in juvenile homicides.
“Anytime we have an increased presence of firearms in a violent altercation or assault we’re increasing the risk of a severely violent outcome,” said Lantz, an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at Florida State University.
‘I’ll never be the same.’ Why do kids kill?
Kahlonii Williams has been wondering what could have driven a child to kill since a 15-year-old boy was charged with felony first-degree murder in the fatal shooting of her cousin Octavia Redmond. Redmond, a 48-year-old Chicago postal worker, was shot July 19 on her route in the city’s West Pullman neighborhood.
Redmond’s husband, Demetrius Redmond, remembers her as a “sweet, kind, caring, giving” woman who loved to recreate recipes she saw on cooking shows.
“She shouldn’t have went through this,” he said. “I ain’t been the same since and I’ll never be the same again. Octavia was my whole world.”
A motive in the killing was not given by police. Williams said she’s lost a loved one to gun violence before, but the perpetrator wasn’t as young as the suspect in her cousin’s killing. She said news of the arrest left her “in disbelief that a 15-year-old could do this.”
“The question is, why? We need to know why,” she said.
The reasons children kill are unique to each situation. Their motives can be similar to adults, but the decision-making portions of adolescent brains are still forming, which can make kids more hasty to use violence to solve petty conflicts, said Kathleen Heide, professor emerita of criminology at the University of South Florida.
“When you have a juvenile who is angry, jealous, upset, terrified, they’re much more likely to react than an adult,” said Heide, author of Young Killers: The Challenge of Juvenile Homicide.
These disputes sometimes originate online, where Muhammad said kids increasingly go to make threats and display weapons as a sort of status symbol. So-called “kidfluencers” as young as 9 can be seen showing off AR-15s and other firearms to social media followers. Research has found there are many reasons why kids post photos of guns, including among gang-affiliated youth, but online activity can sometimes fuel real-world violence.
And when schools shut down during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, many children lost access to critical support systems including violence intervention programs that may help them make better choices, Muhammad said.
Nowhere near juvenile violent crime peak of 1990s
Even as kids are committing more murders, the numbers are nowhere near the 1990s, when thousands of children 17 and younger were arrested for murder, according to a report by researcher Charles Puzzanchera published by the Department of Justice. Those numbers fell sharply around the turn of the century and by 2020, just 930 youths were arrested for murder, according to that report.
While there’s no question these arrests have been on the rise, they involve a small portion of the total youth population, Puzzanchera said.
“We are nowhere near the period of the ’90s that generated a lot of the crime legislation for kids that we’re still sort of undoing,” he said.
Muhammad also stressed that it’s important to remember the vast majority of homicides are committed by and against adults.
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What more can be done?
Muhammad said the first step to preventing youth killings is identifying the young people most likely to be involved and intervening before they become perpetrators of gun violence. A majority of offenders typically show several risk factors, including prior involvement in the criminal justice system, involvement in a formal or informal gang, adverse childhood experiences like poverty and a connection to another victim of gun violence.
“The people are identifiable, the violence is predictable, and therefore it is preventable,” he said.
Prevention must involve targeted interventions that have “specificity and intensity,” Muhammad said. Research suggests violence interrupters and deterrence programs can help reduce homicides, nonfatal shootings and violent crime in cities, according to the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.
In Maryland, Muhammad helped establish a program called the Thrive Academy in which individuals in the community reach out to youth at high risk of gun violence every day and meet with them in person several times a week to connect them with social services and develop positive relationships with them.
In the nine months after its launch, three quarters of the 108 participants stayed free of gun-related or violent offenses, the Baltimore Sun reported. Juvenile Services Secretary Vincent Schiraldi said the results were “super hopeful.”
Over the past three decades, there’s been enormous progress in developing research-based juvenile justice solutions said Hunter Hurst, director of the National Center for Juvenile Justice. Hurst cautioned stakeholders to resist the urge to politicize crime data like this and respond too punitively or too broadly, adding that “over response often impacts young people in communities of color disproportionately.”
Though he called the lack of support for children dealing with mental health issues an ongoing “crisis,” Hurst said the country is in a much better position to deal with what he sees as only a slight rise in youth violence compared to when he first started his career in the 1990s.
“Hopefully this doesn’t continue,” Hurst said. “We should get back to normal.”
