America is a dismal failure in the one area where failure is absolutely unforgivable — protecting our children from gun violence.
It’s not just that we have had no success in stopping the senseless killing of America’s children, whether in mass shootings or in the daily carnage throughout our country. It’s that we haven’t tried hard enough.
Since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, America has had 367 school shootings that caused death or injury. In the 2020-2021 school year alone, 93 school shootings occurred. Let that unfathomable reality sink in. The heartbreak of every dead child that it represents, The families left broken for a lifetime.
In 2020, gun violence overtook car accidents for the first time as the leading cause of death among children and adolescents. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 4,300 young Americans died that year from firearm-related injuries, with mass shooting deaths but a small fraction. The death toll in 2020 was not an anomaly. In 2019, 3,371 children and adolescents were killed with guns, and the numbers have remained consistently high since.
America’s children are being killed by guns like in no other advanced democracy.
CDC data for 2020 comparing the U.S. to 11 comparable democracies on the number of gun deaths among children revealed a sickening disparity: U.S. 4,357 deaths, Australia 10, Austria 4, Belgium 5, Canada 48, France 48, Germany 14, Japan 5, Netherlands 2, Sweden 4, Switzerland 5, UK 8. While gun deaths were the leading cause of death in the U.S., they were on average the 10th leading cause of death in the other countries.
There is plenty of blame to go around for the U.S. being the gun-death capital of the advanced world.
It is easy and absolutely correct to blame 2nd Amendment, pro-gun Americans, the NRA, and the gun industry who do everything possible to thwart all gun-control regulations common among much safer democratic countries. They are a huge part of the problem.
Anti-gun-control Americans are in the minority, however. The majority of Americans support banning assault weapons, requiring licenses for gun purchases, closing universal background-check loopholes, banning high-capacity magazines, and other measures to reduce the terrible surfeit of guns in the country. However, this too-silent majority has made little impact on Congress in enacting the federal gun-control regulations that most Americans support.
Democrats also are a part of the problem. They have had their chances to pass significant gun-control laws common among advanced democracies and have failed. For President Obama’s first two years, Democrats controlled Congress and passed no significant gun-control legislation. President Biden enjoyed Democratic majorities in 2021 and 2022 and no significant gun-control legislation was passed. Democrats have failed our children when they’ve had the opportunity to make a difference, putting other priorities ahead of reducing gun violence.
We are also individually to blame. How many massive anti-gun violence rallies have occurred across the country in the wake of mass shooting after mass shooting? Next to none. We’ve had neither the will nor the courage to raise our collective voices against the gun insanity that is taking the lives of America’s children.
How many of us write our legislators demanding support for gun-control legislation? How many of us join any of the half-dozen national anti-gun violence organizations like the Coalition Against Gun Violence, the Brady Campaign, or Everytown for Gun Safety who labor mightily to build support for gun-control legislation and to elect strong anti-gun violence candidates?
How many of us continue voting for legislators who oppose all gun-control measures and put politics ahead of the welfare of America’s children? How many of us insist on a candidate’s commitment to ending gun violence as a litmus test for supporting him or her?
Of course, it is easy to feel helpless, to believe that nothing we do will matter in the face of such an immense, intractable problem. So we do nothing until the unspeakable tragedy of a child shot dead touches us personally.
Three more young children were shot to death at an elementary school in Nashville last week. Five children on average killed every single day by guns from 2011 to 2021. The plaintive question raised after every horrific shooting becomes rhetorical: How many more children must die before we do something about it?
The answer, tragically, is it doesn’t seem to matter.
Tom Tyner is a freelance writer, editorialist, blogger, college textbook author and retired college English instructor.
