We can’t go outside and have fun without knowing that somebody just died out there. They expressed paranoia, sadness and hopelessness over the loss of their peers to gun violence, both as victims and as those caught up in the cycle of shootings. Another was Aaron Pryor, a football player who was shot and killed in the same city on 27 September, less than a month after his 16th birthday.Ĭalifornia teens told the Guardian in December 2021 the rise in shootings had rocked their communities. One of the young people killed in 2020 was Andre Robinson Jr, who was 19 when he was shot in the back on 8 November while delivering breakfast to his girlfriend’s Oakland, California, home. Photograph: Marissa Leshnov/Marissa Leshnov for The Guardian LaTanya and Andre Robinson Sr hold a cutout photo of their late son, Andre Robinson Jr, who was killed by gunfire in November 2020. Rather, many of them lost their lives in homes where guns were present and unsecured and in the neighborhoods they grew up in. This increase was disparately felt by Black Americans, who despite making up 14% of the US population accounted for nearly half of the nation’s homicide victims, according to FBI data released in the fall of 2021.Īlthough 2020 marked the first year that more children and teens were killed by guns than in car accidents, gun violence has been the number one cause of death among Black teenage boys over 15 for at least a decade, according to CDC data.Īnd these teens weren’t dying in high profile mass shootings on school campuses or malls. Gun homicides across the US rose 33% in 2020, according to the study. The rise in shooting deaths among the nation’s youngest is part of a larger increase in homicides in that same time period. “I can’t remember ever seeing that before.” “We knew gun violence had increased but I was surprised by the level of increase for just one year,” said Dr Jason Goldstick, a researcher with IFIP and associate professor of emergency medicine at the University of Michigan. Drug overdoses and poisoning increased by more than 80% between 20, the researchers found, to become the third leading cause of death among this demographic. The number of deaths from car accidents and gun homicides among infants, children and young adults has been growing closer since 2016.

Michigan data guardian