The Truth About Kids and Shootings * The Gateway Pundit * by Antonio Graceffo

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.

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 claim confuses a narrow category of violence with a much broader mortality statistic.

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.

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.

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.

In Boston, the police department’s 2024 surveillance report states that, over the preceding five years, an average of 35% of shooting victims were listed in its Associative Violence Information System, formerly the Gang Assessment Database. The database contains about 0.25% of the city’s population.

National data also show a concentration of gang activity among young teenagers. The FBI’s Gang Activity, 2021–2024 report, released in September 2025, counted 69,273 incidents involving gang activity. Those ages 13 to 16 were the most frequently reported age group among both offenders and victims, and weapons were used in 80.4% of gang-related incidents.

For young children, disease kills far more than guns do. CDC’s 2024 mortality tables show that among children ages 1 to 4, congenital abnormalities caused 402 deaths and cancer caused 278, compared with 119 firearm deaths in the Johns Hopkins count. Among children ages 5 to 9, cancer caused 400 deaths and congenital abnormalities caused 225, compared with 98 firearm deaths. Cancer alone killed 678 children ages 1 to 9, more than three times the 217 firearm deaths in that age range.

Among those ages 10 to 14, the figures converge: CDC recorded 446 cancer deaths and 487 suicides, while Johns Hopkins counted 450 firearm deaths.

Rankings depend on how causes are grouped. CDC’s standard rankings classify injury deaths by intent, with unintentional injuries ranking first in each age group from 1 to 14. Cancer and congenital abnormalities follow among children ages 1 to 9; suicide and cancer follow among those ages 10 to 14. The Johns Hopkins comparison groups firearm deaths by method, combining homicides, suicides, and accidents into one category. Both rankings are accurate under their respective classifications.

Among unintentional injuries, drowning is the leading cause of death for children ages 1 to 4, while motor vehicle crashes lead among those ages 5 to 14, according to CDC data compiled by the Children’s Safety Network.

The firearm comparison also excludes infants under one year old. According to CDC’s 2024 data, the leading causes of infant death were congenital abnormalities (4,061 deaths), short gestation (2,941), and sudden infant death syndrome (1,351).

Accurate reporting identifies the year, age range, location, and circumstances behind a death count. School shootings, gang violence, accidental discharges, and suicides are separate problems requiring different responses. These include school security, intervention in retaliatory gang violence, and treatment for a suicidal teenager. Folding all these deaths into a claim about school shootings gives readers a false picture of what the statistics measure.

As tragic as school shootings are, they result in a very small number of deaths each year. After a school shooting, the solution liberals always propose is to pass more laws. However, school shootings are already illegal. Next comes the false claim that Republicans are doing nothing about them. Yet nearly 100% of school shooters in U.S. history have either been killed or arrested.

The other solution liberals recommend is taking guns away from everyone. However, crime in other countries demonstrates that when guns are illegal, criminals still have them while citizens are left defenseless. Cellphone videos and citizen reporting now support the “good man with a gun” theory, showing how armed citizens can defend themselves and others.

The same liberals who regard 17 children killed annually in school shootings as a holocaust support abortion, which kills 1.5 million children each year. Those who want the Second Amendment abolished also claim that women were robbed of a constitutional right when Roe v. Wade was overturned, even though the Constitution says nothing about women or anyone else having the right to kill babies.