DENVER (AP) — It was lunchtime on a mild day in the sprawling Denver suburb of Aurora when a truck full of teens pulled into a high school parking lot where students were gathered, and gunfire rang out.
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Three were wounded as others ran in fear.
One of the boys charged in the Nov. 19 shooting later told investigators he brought his armed friends to an expected gang fight because “it’s the way it is in this town,” court documents said.
The shooting was one of several involving teenagers within a two-week span that have placed renewed attention on a long-running problem of gun violence and gangs in the state’s third largest city, where the police department has been under scrutiny for its treatment of Black residents. Activists and officials say easy access to guns is contributing to the problem, which has also been exacerbated by the pandemic and its effect particularly on the mental health of minority teens in the city.
Across the United States, shootings involving children and teenagers have increased in recent years, including 2021. A March report from the Children’s Defense Fund found child and teen shooting deaths reached a 19-year high in 2017 and have remained elevated. Black children and teenagers were four times more likely than whites to be fatally shot.
Aurora has seen an increase in Black and Latino families and immigrants from around the world as Denver has grown more expensive in recent years. These families of color have been hit harder health-wise but also economically by the COVID-19 pandemic, contributing to mental health problems, said Maisha Fields, an activist who works with youth and families in the city of about 379,000.
The Nov. 19 shooting started with an argument in the parking lot at Hinkley High School after the truckload of boys arrived. After the initial shots were fired, the pickup drove away, with at least two teens pointing guns from the windows, sending students running in fear, according to police.
Three 16-year-olds were later charged, including the boy who...Gun violence in the United States results in tens of thousands of deaths and injuries annually. In 2018, the most recent year for which data are available as of 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics reports 38,390 deaths by firearm, of which 24,432 were by suicide. The rate of firearm deaths per 100,000 people rose from 10.3 per 100,000 in 1999 to 12 per 100,000 in 2017, with 109 people dying per day or about 14,542 homicides in total, being 11.9 per 100,000 in 2018. In 2010, there were 19,392 firearm-related suicides, and 11,078 firearm-related homicides in the U.S. In 2010, 358 murders were reported involving a rifle while 6,009 were reported involving a handgun; another 1,939 were reported with an unspecified type of firearm.
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About 1.4 million people have died from firearms in the U.S. between 1968 and 2011. This number includes all deaths resulting from a firearm, including suicides, homicides, and accidents.
Violent crime See also: Gun violence in the United States by state In the United States, areas with higher levels of gun ownership have an increased risk of gun assault and gun robbery. However it is unclear if higher crime rates are a result of increased gun ownership or if gun ownership rates increase as a result of increased crime.
Compared to 22 other high-income nations, the U.S. gun-related homicide rate is 25 times higher. Although it has half the population of the other 22 nations combined, among those 22 nations studied, the U.S. had 82 percent of gun deaths, 90 percent of all women killed with guns, 91 percent of children under 14 and 92 percent of young people between ages 15 and 24 killed with guns. The ownership and regulation of guns are among the most widely debated issues in the country.
Gun violence against other persons is most common in poor urban areas and is frequently associated with gang violence, often involving male juveniles or young adult males. African American populations in the United States experience high amounts of firearms injury and homicide. Although mass shootings are covered extensively in the media, mass shootings in the United States account for only a small fraction of gun-related deaths. School shootings are described as a 'uniquely American crisis', according to The Washington Post in 2018. According to USA Today, in 2019 “about 95% of public schools now have students and teachers practice huddling in silence, hiding from an imaginary gunman.”
Legislation at the federal, state, and local levels has attempted to address gun violence through a variety of methods, including restricting firearms purchases by youths and other 'at-risk' populations, setting waiting periods for firearm purchases, establishing gun buyback programs, law enforcement and policing strategies, stiff sentencing of gun law violators, education programs for parents and children, and community-outreach programs.
A quarter of robberies of commercial premises in the U.S. are committed with guns. Fatalities are three times as likely in robberies committed with guns than where other, or no, weapons are used, with similar patterns in cases of family violence. Criminologist Philip J. Cook hypothesized that if guns were less available, criminals might commit the same crime, but with less-lethal weapons. He finds that the level of gun ownership in the 50 largest U.S. cities correlates with the rate of robberies committed with guns, but not with overall robbery rates. He also finds that robberies in which the assailant uses a gun are more likely to result in the death of the victim, but less likely to result in injury to the victim. Overall robbery and assault rates in the U.S. are comparable to those in other developed countries, such as Australia and Finland, with much lower levels of gun ownership. A 2000 study showed a strong association between the availability of illegal guns and violent crime rates, but not between legal gun availability and violent crime rates.
See also Assault with a deadly weapon Offenders Considering mass shootings alone, nearly all shooters are male. A database of 101 mass shootings between 1982 and 2018 recorded 98 male shooters, 2 female shooters, and one partnership of a male and female shooter. The race of the shooters included 58 whites, 16 blacks, 8 Asians, 7 Latinos, 3 Native Americans, and 8 unknown/other.
Child Access Prevention laws, enacted by many states, require parents to store firearms safely, to minimize access by children to guns, while maintaining ease of access by adults. CAP laws hold gun owners liable should a child gain access to a loaded gun that is not properly stored. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that, on average, one child died every three days in accidental incidents in the U.S. from 2000 to 2005. In most states, CAP law violations are considered misdemeanors. Florida's CAP law, enacted in 1989, permits felony prosecution of violators. Research indicates that CAP laws are correlated with a reduction in unintentional gun deaths by 23%, and gun suicides among those aged 14 through 17 by 11%. A study by Lott did not detect a relationship between CAP laws and accidental gun deaths or suicides among those age 19 and under between 1979 and 1996. However, two studies disputed Lott's findings. A 2013 study found that CAP laws are correlated with a reduction of non-fatal gun injuries among both children and adults by 30–40%. In 2016 the American Academy of Pediatrics found that safe gun storage laws were associated with lower overall adolescent suicide rates. Research also indicated that CAP laws were most highly correlated with reductions of non-fatal gun injuries in states where violations were considered felonies, whereas in states that considered violations as misdemeanors, the potential impact of CAP laws was not statistically significant.
Children Prevention programs geared towards children have also not been greatly successful. Many inherent challenges arise when working with children, including their tendency to perceive themselves as invulnerable to injury, limited ability to apply lessons learned, their innate curiosity, and peer pressure.
The goal of gun safety programs, usually administered by local firearms dealers and shooting clubs, is to teach older children and adolescents how to handle firearms safely. There has been no systematic evaluation of the effect of these programs on children. For adults, no positive effect on gun storage practices has been found as a result of these programs. Also, researchers have found that gun safety programs for children may likely increase a child's interest in obtaining and using guns, which they cannot be expected to use safely all the time, even with training.
One approach taken is gun avoidance, such as when encountering a firearm at a neighbor's home. The Eddie Eagle Gun Safety Program, administered by the National Rifle Association, is geared towards younger children from pre-kindergarten to sixth grade, and teaches kids that real guns are not toys by emphasizing a 'just say no' approach. The Eddie Eagle program is based on training children in a four-step action to take when they see a firearm: Stop! Don't touch! Leave the area. Go tell an adult. Materials, such as coloring books and posters, back the lessons up and provide the repetition necessary in any child-education program. ABC News challenged the effectiveness of the 'just say no' approach promoted by the NRA's Eddie the Eagle program in an investigative piece by Diane Sawyer in 1999. Sawyer's piece was based on an academic study conducted by Dr. Marjorie Hardy. Dr. Hardy's study tracked the behavior of elementary age schoolchildren who spent a day learning the Eddie the Eagle four-step action plan from a uniformed police officer. The children were then placed into a playroom which contained a hidden gun. When the children found the gun, they did not run away from the gun, but rather, they inevitably played with it, pulled the trigger while looking into the barrel, or aimed the gun at a playmate and pulled the trigger. The study concluded that children's natural curiosity was far more powerful than the parental admonition to 'Just say no'.
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