Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| September 2025<\/strong><\/p>\n The nation remains fixated on last week\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0homicides at school<\/a>, including both mass shootings and individual murders.<\/p>\n School shootings garner massive press, politician, and public attention, each fostering\u00a0emotional declarations<\/a>\u00a0that 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 \u201cchildren\u2019s\u201d internet behaviors (the Minneapolis\u00a0shooter was 23<\/a>).<\/p>\n 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 \u201cexperts,\u201d and political leaders owe a larger duty to young people to advance sound policy that prioritizes dangers.<\/p>\n Even if we consider\u00a0only mass shootings,\u00a0<\/em>one 64-year-old<\/a>\u00a0shot more people in Las Vegas in 15 minutes than are shot in all 130,000 U.S. schools in four years.<\/p>\n Very few provide crucial contexts \u2013 and they\u2019re ignored<\/strong><\/p>\n One rare exception is the\u00a0Giffords Law Center<\/a>: \u201cSchools are generally safe havens from the gun violence that is so prevalent elsewhere\u2026 at least 50 times as many murders of young people ages 5\u201318 occurred away from school than at school.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMass shootings account for less than 1% of all firearms deaths in the United States,\u201d adds\u00a0Dr. Los Lee<\/a>, Harvard Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine professor. \u201cFor children, it\u2019s also less than 1%… a very small number.\u201d<\/p>\n No one touches that reality \u2013 and it gets worse.<\/p>\n The\u00a0Centers for Disease Control<\/a>\u00a0reports 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\u2019\u00a0child homicide rate<\/a>\u00a0is 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.<\/p>\n Where, then, are most children murdered?<\/strong><\/p>\n While 25 to 30 children and youth are killed in mass shootings (including at school) every year, 850 to 900 are\u00a0murdered in substantiated cases of violence at home<\/a>. Another 1,000-plus children, nearly all infants, die from criminal neglect every year, often the result of parents\u2019 poverty, mental illness, addiction, jailing, and\/or absence.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen American parents are surveyed about their concerns, everyone is worried about school shootings,\u201d a\u00a0JAMA Pediatrics study<\/a>\u00a0author said. \u201cThe message from our data is really simple: Our fears are incorrectly placed. Our homes may, in fact, be more dangerous than schools.\u201d<\/p>\n May be<\/em>? Thirty times more children and teens are murdered, and 8 times more school-age kids are shot to death,\u00a0at home by grownups<\/a>\u00a0than at school.<\/p>\n Nine in 10 of the killers are\u00a0parents, parents\u2019 partners, or other legal caretakers<\/a>. In fact, 6 in 10 children killed in\u00a0mass shootings<\/em>\u00a0(the ones you don\u2019t hear about) are\u00a0murdered by parents<\/a>, not by school shooters, gangs, other kids.\u00a0FBI cross-tabulations<\/a>\u00a0show 85% of child victims are murdered by adults; half of the murderers of children are 25 and older.<\/p>\n We see fleeting mentions of their deaths: \u201cFather admits lining up 3 young sons, shooting them<\/a>;\u201d \u201cFather in custody after 3 boys, mother shot to death\u2026 8 year-old girl also shot, in serious condition<\/a>;\u201d \u201cFather who murdered daughter shot son in head<\/a>;\u201d \u201cStepdad in custody after boy, 9, is shot dead<\/a>;\u201d \u201cStepdad fatally shoots 15-year-old stepson over unfinished chores<\/a>\u201d \u2026 the devastating headlines just from recent months march on and on, quickly shrugged off.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cnews.\u201d That doesn\u2019t excuse the fact that few care enough about \u201cthe children!\u201d to talk honestly about the most fundamental issue: who is murdering them, and where.<\/p>\n Instead of acknowledging the harsh truth that the biggest single reason guns are \u201cthe leading cause of external death for America\u2019s children and adolescents\u201d 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 \u201cyoung men\u201d \u2013 powerless groups at whom it is easy to point accusing fingers.<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n The result is that decade after decade, thousands of murdered American kids remain unrecognized, uncared-about, too inconvenient for America\u2019s fragile politics to acknowledge.<\/p>\n The same rush to exploit the tiny number of youths\u2019 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The murdered kids we don\u2019t care about, Part 1 Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| September 2025 The nation remains fixated on last week\u2019s 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. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-161203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=161203"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":161204,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161203\/revisions\/161204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=161203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=161203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=161203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}