Young Victims, Young Suspects: The Kansas City Shooting and Gun Violence

After the shooting in Kansas City this week at a parade to celebrate the Super Bowl victory of the hometown Chiefs, children who had been struck by gunfire flooded into Children’s Mercy Hospital, less than a mile from Union Station, where the shooting occurred.

“Fear,” the hospital’s chief nursing officer, Stephanie Meyer, told reporters. “The one word I would use to describe what we saw and how they felt when they came to us was fear.”

On the other side of the guns were young people, too, according to the authorities who said on Friday that two teenagers detained in the aftermath of the shooting had been charged with “gun-related” offenses and with resisting arrest.

What had seemed like an attack on the parade itself turned out to be a far more common act of American violence: a dispute that ended in gunfire, and in this case, left one person dead and 22 people injured, about half of them younger than 16.

The shooting was news around the world because of when and where it unfolded. But in many respects, the circumstances were all too familiar in a country where guns and gun violence are pervasive

“If this exact same thing happened in a gas station or in a neighborhood or in another community, no one would be talking about it,” said James Densley, a professor of criminal justice at Metro State University in Minnesota who studies youth violence.

Kansas City has been enduring a lot of that bloodshed. The city has one of the highest murder rates in the nation, and last year 182 people were killed, surpassing a high mark set in 2020. City officials say many of the killings were attributed to arguments, the same cause that investigators cited in the shooting at the Super Bowl parade.

That kids were both victims and, according to authorities, perpetrators underscores what experts and data suggest is the disturbing ease with which young people can end up shooting someone, or being shot.

“Pushing and shoving escalate very quickly into shooting whenever guns are present,” Mr. Densley said. “And so there’s a lot of conflict resolution, shall we say, or dispute resolution, that is done down the barrel of a gun with these young people.”

Many policymakers breathed a sigh of relief when preliminary homicide numbers in the nation showed a sharp drop in 2023, the second consecutive year of decline after a spike of violence during the pandemic.

However, the numbers remain well above the prepandemic years, and even those figures were higher than the number of annual killings that took place earlier last decade.

And evidence suggests that even as the overall number of fatal shootings falls, the number of incidents involving minors may be rising.

A person younger than 18 shot and killed another child somewhere in the United States once per day on average last year, according to incident reports compiled by the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks shootings throughout the nation. The frequency has risen steadily over time, though it is difficult to say by exactly how much since the demographic details on suspects and victims in cases is sometimes incomplete.

Yet the trend is generally consistent with other data on children and gun violence. Gun violence in 2020 became the leading cause of death for children and teenagers, surpassing car accidents, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

After peaking in 2021, gun homicides among adults fell by more than 7 percent in 2022. But for children ages 12 to 17, the total increased by 8 percent, according to cause-of-death data published by the C.D.C.

While the C.D.C. has not yet released figures for 2023, data from the Gun Violence Archive suggest a similar pattern continued: an overall decrease in gun deaths, but no decline in juvenile gun victims. And often, children are among both the victims and suspects.

Milwaukee is a city that has grappled with the problem of youth violence for years. Last year, there were at least eight cases in which children were alleged to have fatally shot other children in the city, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

On New Year’s Day 2023, a 17-year-old was killed and two other people injured in a shooting inside a restaurant.

Three weeks later, a 14-year-old was killed and his 13-year-old brother wounded while making a video.

And the killings there continued apace.

In March, a 15-year-old boy was fatally shot. Later that month, another 15-year-old boy was killed and five other people were wounded when gunfire erupted during a fight on the street.

In all, 96 children have been murdered in Milwaukee since 2020, up from 34 in the prior four years, according to the Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission. Children comprised more than 12 percent of the city’s murder victims since the pandemic, up from 7 percent in the years before, the commission’s data shows, and guns were involved in the vast majority of cases.

The number of children suspected of killing also tripled during the pandemic years compared with the period before, the commission’s data shows.

Children shooting children is not a phenomenon limited to large cities. In Urbana, Ill., there have been three such incidents within a single neighborhood since 2020, according to the Gun Violence Archive. There were also three child-on-child gun homicides over the same time period within a mile radius in Canton, Miss., according to the nonprofit.

In survey after survey of young people, researchers have found that the vast majority of teenagers who acquire and carry guns do so because they feel unsafe in their neighborhoods. They believe — often correctly — that many other people are carrying guns.

“It’s almost always that they’re afraid,” said David Hemenway, a professor of health policy at Harvard who studies young people and gun violence. “And why are they afraid? Because other kids have guns.”

And then he has often asked a follow-up question.

“We say, what kind of world do you want to live in — where it’s easy to get guns, hard to get guns or impossible to get guns? And an overwhelming majority want to live in a world where it’s impossible for teens like them to get guns. Even the ones who illegally carry, the majority of them usually say we’d like to live in a world where it’s impossible for teens like us to get guns.”

Kevin Draper contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.