A dubious distinction about children and guns was noted in a medical journal last week with little of the fanfare or fear or loathing that it deserved.
in the New England Journal of Medicine, three researchers from the University of Michigan wrote that in 2020 guns became the leading cause of death among children and teens for the first time, according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“The increasing firearm-related mortality reflects a longer-term trend and shows that we continue to fail to protect our youth from a preventable cause of death,†the researchers wrote.
Any parent of a teenager knows what the leading cause of death among children and teens has long been: vehicle accidents. As our children begin to drive, we fear that outcome enough that we sign them up for defensive driving courses, and these days, track their driving with apps on our phones.
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That cause of death, though, has waned over the years because lawmakers have long been willing to treat it like the public health crisis that it is, passing seat belt and air bag laws; cracking down on DUIs, speeding and running red lights; or adding speed bumps in neighborhoods where young children play.
With guns, though — particularly in a place like Missouri where Republicans hold a supermajority in the Legislature — there is no movement to protect our children from death. Instead, there is a misguided belief that the price we pay for the Second Amendment is the death of our children, in schools, in movie theaters or sleeping in their beds as random bullets whiz past.
So, every year, here in ºüÀêÊÓƵ, we add to the list of names:
• Christopher Harris.
• Dominique Evans.
• Jamyla Bolden.
• Kennedi Powell.
These are just a few of the names in a list that grows each year. We hold vigils and hand out gun locks. But we don’t pass new laws to keep guns away from children, even though there is wide bipartisan support for making the most basic changes to gun laws to help keep children and others safe. In fact, in Missouri, we go the other way.
Just this week, the Missouri Supreme Court kept alive a lawsuit filed jointly by the city of ºüÀêÊÓƵ and Jackson and ºüÀêÊÓƵ counties seeking to overturn a law passed last year by Republicans in the Missouri Legislature. The bill, dubbed the Second Amendment Preservation Act, has damaged the ability of police to enforce gun laws in the state, or work hand-in-hand with federal partners, such as on joint drug task forces. The remarkable thing about the attempt to overturn that law is that a wide swath of folks who often find themselves on opposite ends of the political spectrum when talking about crime support the effort.
Police chiefs oppose the law. oppose the law. Sheriffs oppose the law. Mayor Tishaura O. Jones and ºüÀêÊÓƵ County Executive Sam Page oppose the law. Activists who want to reimagine policing oppose the law. Cops in blue, urban cities, and red, rural counties oppose the law, because it makes all of us less safe, while not doing anything to protect our already untouchable Second Amendment rights in Missouri.
The law passed because some Republicans in the Missouri Legislature are more beholden to the out-of-state donors who wrote the bill than they are to the concept of protecting kids from dying at the hands of guns. Researchers who study these things don’t yet know why homicide deaths spiked in 2020 among children, anymore than they know for sure why homicides spiked that year in some American cities.
But in Missouri, after a long trend of watching and gun deaths rise, we know this:
Making it harder for police officers to keep guns off the street is a step in the wrong direction.