The murdered kids we don’t care about, Part 1
Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| September 2025
The nation remains fixated on last week’s shooting at a Minneapolis school, in which 2 children were killed and 17 children and 1 adult injured. Mass shootings deserve the anguish they engender and the vital context they rarely get.
Around 25 to 30 American children and youths are killed in mass shootings every year, including in school shootings. If we take the worst recent year on record, 35 children and teens died in homicides at school, including both mass shootings and individual murders.
School shootings garner massive press, politician, and public attention, each fostering emotional declarations that schools are so drastically dangerous compared to the presumed safety of homes that parents must fear sending their kids to school, along with demands that parents monitor their “children’s” internet behaviors (the Minneapolis shooter was 23).
Survivors and parents victimized by school shootings understandably focus on these tragedies. But health officials (especially the Surgeon General), medical and mental health professionals, academic “experts,” and political leaders owe a larger duty to young people to advance sound policy that prioritizes dangers.
Even if we consider only mass shootings, one 64-year-old shot more people in Las Vegas in 15 minutes than are shot in all 130,000 U.S. schools in four years.
Very few provide crucial contexts – and they’re ignored
One rare exception is the Giffords Law Center: “Schools are generally safe havens from the gun violence that is so prevalent elsewhere… at least 50 times as many murders of young people ages 5–18 occurred away from school than at school.”
“Mass shootings account for less than 1% of all firearms deaths in the United States,” adds Dr. Los Lee, Harvard Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine professor. “For children, it’s also less than 1%… a very small number.”
No one touches that reality – and it gets worse.
The Centers for Disease Control reports that 1,996 children and youths under age 18 were victims of homicides in 2024, 1,355, or two-thirds, by guns. The United States’ child homicide rate is 10 times that of Canada, 15 times that of France, 20 times that of the UK, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Australia; and 60 times that of Japan.
Where, then, are most children murdered?
While 25 to 30 children and youth are killed in mass shootings (including at school) every year, 850 to 900 are murdered in substantiated cases of violence at home. Another 1,000-plus children, nearly all infants, die from criminal neglect every year, often the result of parents’ poverty, mental illness, addiction, jailing, and/or absence.
“When American parents are surveyed about their concerns, everyone is worried about school shootings,” a JAMA Pediatrics study author said. “The message from our data is really simple: Our fears are incorrectly placed. Our homes may, in fact, be more dangerous than schools.”
May be? Thirty times more children and teens are murdered, and 8 times more school-age kids are shot to death, at home by grownups than at school.
Nine in 10 of the killers are parents, parents’ partners, or other legal caretakers. In fact, 6 in 10 children killed in mass shootings (the ones you don’t hear about) are murdered by parents, not by school shooters, gangs, other kids. FBI cross-tabulations show 85% of child victims are murdered by adults; half of the murderers of children are 25 and older.
We see fleeting mentions of their deaths: “Father admits lining up 3 young sons, shooting them;” “Father in custody after 3 boys, mother shot to death… 8 year-old girl also shot, in serious condition;” “Father who murdered daughter shot son in head;” “Stepdad in custody after boy, 9, is shot dead;” “Stepdad fatally shoots 15-year-old stepson over unfinished chores” … the devastating headlines just from recent months march on and on, quickly shrugged off.
No agonized commentaries, zero official attention, in contrast to the avalanche that followed the Minnesota and every other school shooting. Mass shootings that get intense attention are rare, sensational, devastating, and public, the definition of “news.” That doesn’t excuse the fact that few care enough about “the children!” to talk honestly about the most fundamental issue: who is murdering them, and where.
Instead of acknowledging the harsh truth that the biggest single reason guns are “the leading cause of external death for America’s children and adolescents” is because American adults are shooting them, officials and commentators indulge pleasing pretenses. 99% of the official/media discussion fixates on children killed by other children, teens, or “young men” – powerless groups at whom it is easy to point accusing fingers.
Confronting the enormous toll household grownups take on children and youth raises questions no politically-attuned entity would ever raise: are American grownups responsible enough to keep guns, especially in homes?
The result is that decade after decade, thousands of murdered American kids remain unrecognized, uncared-about, too inconvenient for America’s fragile politics to acknowledge.
The same rush to exploit the tiny number of youths’ suicides that anti-youth and anti-online critics believe they can blame on social-media or Artificial Intelligence versus the vastly larger numbers connected to abusive and severely troubled parents and families will be the subject of Part 2.