Gun Deaths in Children Have Nearly Doubled Since 2011

America’s gun violence crisis is causing a staggering surge of mortality in children, a study finds.

The researchers, including the mother-daughter team Rebekah Mannix, M.D., from Boston Children’s Hospital, and teen daughter Cordelia Mannix analyzed data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on injuries in children between 2011 and 2021.

Their study, published Thursday in the journal Pediatrics, found that firearm fatalities among the youth increased 87% over the 10 year study period. The only injury with a larger increase was drug poisoning deaths — another crisis in America — jumping 133% over the 10 year period.

From 2011 to 2021, over the period of a decade, fatal injuries of any kind increased from 14.07 to 17.3 per 100,000 children, but nonfatal injuries decreased from 11,592.6 to 5359.7 per 100,000 children. Suffocation related fatalities grew the third most in this class, increasing by 12.5%.

“Despite the progress in reducing most nonfatal injuries, the trends in increasing nonfatal firearm and poisoning injuries defy the overall trend in nonfatal injuries, in part because public health legislative support has lagged in these critical injury mechanisms,” the authors say. “This is especially concerning given the high case fatality rate of these injury mechanisms in children.”

Firearms are now the leading killer of American children, according to a study published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine. Between a rise in school and mass shootings, accidental gun deaths and deaths by suicide, experts warn America’s gun problem is taking a toll on the youth.