Most childhood gun violence victims in MU study were not targeted

COLUMBIA, MO (KMIZ)

Most of the kids hurt by guns who were studied by University of Missouri researchers were not the targets of the bullets that hit them, according to a recent study.

The study, published in the Journal of Surgical Research, also found that childhood gun injuries are the leading cause of death among American children. The study looked to find what was causing most of these incidents.

Firearm injuries surpassed car crashes as the leading cause of child deaths in 2020. The number of children and teens killed by gunfire has also risen 50% among children from 2019 to 2021, according to the Pew Research Center.  

"I do think it kind of stresses us out, like the healthcare staff more, just because it is a child or a minor , and they're not necessarily responsible for the situation they're put in," Alex Kuiken, an Emergency Department Technician from OSF Healthcare said.

Two children have been shot in the last month just outside Columbia, including one child investigators say was outside on Bellview Drive when he was shot a little more than a week ago. Another child was shot in March on Demaret Drive.

The increase in children's gun deaths is part of a trend that saw a record number of Americans of killed by guns. In 2021, 48,830 Americans of all ages died from gunshot wounds, which surpassed the highest yearly total on record. 

The group of researchers led by Mary Bernardin,  an assistant professor of clinical emergency medicine and pediatric emergency medicine, found that the majority of children's injuries were not from intentional assaults. 

Despite guns being the leading cause of child deaths in America there are very few studies that focuses on gun violence and it's impact on children. Bernardin wanted to understand the circumstances behind gun violence involving children.

Most of the shootings affecting kids are labeled as firearm assaults which is a broad term used to describe a wide variety of incidents. 

"To label the majority of them as firearm assaults isn’t accurate and I don’t think is very fair to the victims or their families and it doesn't really help us start to unravel this problem, Bernardin said."

The study involved 156 children ages 6-17 years old who were at St. Louis Children’s Hospital from 2014 to 2017 because of gun injuries. The hospital was selected for the study because St Louis is known to have one of the United States' highest adolescent firearm mortality rates.

Their research showed that 72% of these children were shot outdoors by an unknown shooter whose motivation was unknown in 93% of cases. Thirty-six percent of those shootings were the result of drive-by shootings that happened to catch nearby children with stray bullets. 

Less than 15% of these shootings were intentional. The St. Louis area was responsible for 40% of all incidents included in the study. The majority of the victims (98.1%) were Black boys, who had an average age of 15 years old.

The study also found that three high-risk incident ZIP codes in St. Louis City accounted for 40% of the shootings. 

"We can’t underscore how important it is that we need to invest in these communities," Bernardin said. "In order to combat the gun violence that’s affecting children we have to combat the causes of crime in these neighborhoods."