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'Our children have the right to live': Record 6,036 American kids killed or injured by gunfire in 2022

Written by Jessica Corbett

Common Dreams

December 28, 2022

With just a few days left until the new year, 2022 has already set a grim record: so far at least 6,036 children across the United States have been killed or injured by gunfire, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

As of Tuesday, 306 children under age 12 were killed by guns and another 668 were injured nationwide. For those ages 12-17, 1,328 were killed and 3,734 were injured.

Those figures include the 19 kids—but not the two adults—killed in the May 24 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and come just a few weeks after the nation marked the 10th anniversary of the massacre of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

Launched in 2013, the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) is an online project that aims "to document incidents of gun violence and gun crime nationally to provide independent, verified data to those who need to use it in their research, advocacy, or writing."

GVA's annual figures for child deaths and injuries go back to 2014. As the group highlighted in a tweet Monday, this year is the first in recorded history that the overall number has topped 6,000—which Project Unloaded called "heartbreaking and preventable."

Gun violence data for children and teenagers since 2014:

2014: 2,859

2015: 3,378

2016: 3,819

2017: 3,982

2018: 3,546

2019: 3,825

2020: 5,160

2021: 5,708

2022: 6,021 [in 360 days]

Jacob Sumner, who is pursuing a master's degree in public administration at Arizona State University as a Sackton fellow, tweeted of GVA's figures that "we should not and cannot allow that to be normal. We need lifesaving commonsense gun safety measures."

Noting ABC News' reporting on the record, Brady PAC—a political action committee that supports candidates who champion policies to reduce gun violence—declared that "our children have the right to live."

Another ABC reader described the development as "an absolute f*cking disgrace."

U.S. President Joe Biden—who signed some gun safety reforms into law after the Uvalde shooting—said on the Sandy Hook anniversary that "we have a moral obligation to pass and enforce laws that can prevent these things from happening again." However, with the GOP set to take control of the U.S. House next week, progress on the issue over the next two years is unlikely.

A study published in the Journal of Trauma found that “children 5-14 years old were more likely to die from unintentional firearm injuries, suicides and homicides if they lived in states with more rather than fewer guns.” Put simply: access and exposure to firearms increases the chances that a kid or teen will be involved in an unintentional shooting incident. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, this is one of the leading causes of accidental death for children between the ages of 1-14.

Keeping guns in the hands of their owners is one crucial tactic, according to gun control advocates. In his column this week, New York Times columnist Nick Kristof profiles Kai Kloepfer, a Colorado teen who developed a “smart gun” that can only be fired by an authorized user. The model relies on biomestric user authentication, meaning it only fires when it recognizes the finger holding the trigger. If a child stumbled upon a parents’ firearm, he or she would not be able to use it. According to Kristof, “over 1,000 fingerprints can be authorized per gun, and Kloepfer says the sensor is 99.999 percent accurate.”

Kloepfer’s design, which he made for a science fair project, is impressively sophisticated. But smart gun technology has existed for decades. Some models rely on proximity sensors, some on magnets, and others, like Kloepfer’s, on biometrics. In one version, the iP1, the gun owner wears a radio-frequency identification watch that communicates with the pistol. An internal tracking device prevents the gun from firing if it is away from the owner. Smart guns have beenpraised by New York congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy and Attorney General Eric Holder for “decreasing the misuse of weapons.” The executive director of the American Association of Suicidology has also voiced support for the technology, saying that it would lower the rate of shooting suicides, especially among male teens. So why haven’t smart guns caught on?

The principal reason—as is so often the case when it comes to gun safety measures—is the virulent opposition of the gun lobby. The National Rifle Association has spoken out against smart guns, claiming that they rely on expensive, unreliable features and are prone to failure. The organization, like other gun rights advocates, fears that the technology could become mandatory.

Last year, Armatrix, the German company that developed the iP1, convinced two American gun dealerships to offer its model. Second Amendment advocates promptly launched a media attack on the gun-shop owners, and one of the owners, Andy Raymond, received phone calls from people threatening to burn his store down if he sold the iP1. Ultimately, both owners reversed course and decided against selling the gun.

Instead of inventing hypothetical situations in which smart guns could fail, we should be working on refining the technology behind them, making them cheaper, more widely available, and consistently reliable for users. It makes no sense to maintain the status quo of thousands of new graves every year, because a new technology hypothetically may not work.