School Shootings Not Top Cause of Child Death, Data Shows
Analysis reveals school shootings are a small fraction of firearm deaths among children, with other causes like disease and accidents leading.
3 min read
On October 15, a 16-year-old former student shot out the glass panes of a side door at Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon. He then opened fire in a special needs classroom where he had once been taught. He killed three children, ages 5, 8, and 11, and a 25-year-old teacher, and wounded a 7-year-old girl and a 54-year-old teacher. A father of two Silver Rail students followed him inside with a legally owned .40-caliber pistol and shot him dead.
School Shootings Not the Leading Cause of Child Death
Education Week’s tracker has recorded 26 K–12 school shootings with injuries or deaths so far this year, resulting in 17 deaths. The Bend attack was the deadliest.
After a school shooting, a familiar claim circulates online: school shootings are the leading cause of death among American children. The claim is categorically false and can be rejected on basic logical grounds: school shootings cannot be the leading cause when other causes account for far more than 17 child deaths each year. The data also support this argument.
The statistic cited to claim that school shootings are the leading cause of death among American children actually covers all firearm deaths among young people ages 1 to 17, wherever they occur, including homicides, suicides, and unintentional shootings.
Firearm Deaths Rank Fifth, But Disease and Accidents Lead
The Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions analyzed CDC death-certificate data and counted 2,214 firearm deaths in that age group in 2024. On that basis, it ranked guns as the leading cause of death for the fifth consecutive year. However, that ranking depends on how the comparison is built.
The report ranks guns against other individual causes of death, and its own chart shows that firearm deaths exceeded the 2,119 motor vehicle deaths by 95. Cancer followed with 1,511 deaths, drowning with 891, and suffocation with 866.
The chart excluded 1,587 deaths classified as “all other diseases” and 973 from congenital abnormalities. Combined with cancer, those categories accounted for 4,071 deaths among young people ages 1 to 17, nearly twice the firearm total. The firearm category combines homicides, suicides, and accidents, while disease is divided into separate categories. Under that grouping, guns rank first.
Gun Violence and Gang Activity in Communities
Nearly 60% of the firearm deaths were homicides, and 31% were suicides. The same report notes that firearms were not always the leading cause of death within individual youth age groups.
School shootings account for a small fraction of the total. Education Week’s 2024 tracker counts only shootings on K–12 property or school buses and excludes suicides. It recorded 18 deaths in school shootings in 2024, including 10 school employees or other adults.
The word “children” also obscures large differences between young children and older teenagers. Of the 2,214 firearm deaths among those ages 1 to 17 in 2024, 1,547 were teenagers ages 15 to 17, about 70% of the total. Another 450 were ages 10 to 14, 98 were ages 5 to 9, and 119 were ages 1 to 4, according to the Johns Hopkins data. Children ages 1 to 9 accounted for about 10% of the total. A single combined figure treats a 6-year-old and a 16-year-old as if they faced the same risk.
Gang violence accounts for a large share of shootings in some communities. In November 2024, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced the indictment of 30 members of three gangs and crews. His office said they were responsible for about 50% of shootings that year in Washington Heights and Inwood. The rivalry began with a killing in 2018 and led to 18 shootings that killed seven people, including innocent bystanders.
Source: The Gateway Pundit
