In the wake of the most recent US mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 pupils and two teachers were killed by an 18-year-old armed with an assault rifle, a comparison considering how the US compares with other countries on children’s deaths caused by guns is compelling.
As the independent non-profit US organisation the Children’s Defense Fund has pointed out, gun violence is now the leading cause of US children’s deaths. It reported that there are nine fatal shootings of children per day, that’s one killing every two hours and thirty six minutes. A minority of these killings involve school or mass shootings, the majority are killings of individual children and link to routine crime and gang violence, and overwhelmingly result in the deaths of African-American and minority children.
The US stands as an extreme outlier among high income countries. The number of children killed by guns is 36.5 times higher in the US, compared to many other high income countries including Austria, Australia, Sweden, England and Wales, according to analysis recently published by the New England Journal of Medicine. In recent years international research has also proven conclusively that greater levels of gun ownership are closely associated with higher rates of gun violence.
