From the New York Times Magazine:
Childhood’s Greatest Danger: The Data on Kids and Gun Violence
Gun violence recently surpassed car accidents as the leading cause of death for American children.
By Robert Gebeloff, Danielle Ivory, Bill Marsh, Allison McCann and Albert Sun
12/14/2022
… Since 2018, [homicides involving children] have increased by more than 73 percent. Most homicides involved Black children, who make up a small share of all children but shoulder the burden of gun violence more than any others, a disparity that is growing sharply. …
The recent spike in gun deaths for Black children builds on a continuing phenomenon in which some children are exposed to much more violence than others. While guns became the leading cause of death for American children only recently, they have been the leading cause of death among Black children for at least two decades. …
Black and Hispanic boys and girls are likelier, on average, than their white counterparts to live in neighborhoods with high levels of poverty, a situation that often stems from structurally racist practices like segregation. And they’re more likely to be proximate to the kinds of violence that are concentrated in those neighborhoods.
They are also vastly more likely to perpetrate gun homicides.
Although the pandemic cannot be fully responsible for a trend that began well before the pandemic, researchers said that stresses related to Covid, which has killed Black and Hispanic people at higher rates than white people, might have exacerbated existing differences in gun deaths among both adults and children in recent years.
Jonathan Jay, an assistant professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health, recently co-published research showing that racial disparities in childhood exposure to neighborhood gun violence grew during the pandemic.
“In places where violence is endemic, people pick up guns because they feel unsafe, and that perpetuates cycles of violence,” Jay said. “During the pandemic, the trauma of losing loved ones to Covid, seeing Black and brown people being killed by police and then seeing an increase in violence likely have all perpetuated cycles of violence.”
He added, “Because of this cyclical nature, it makes sense that a lot of folks continue to feel unsafe.”
Obviously, blacks shooting blacks in even higher numbers during the police pullback couldn’t have had anything to do with the sainted name of George Floyd.
When will there be a reckoning for the Great and the Good who got so many incremental black kids killed by promoting the “racial reckoning”?
I mean, besides never.
