The Other Pandemic: Gun Violence and Its Impact on Children and Youth

My town is in the national news this week—and not for something that could engender civic pride. Instead, I feel heartbroken. The headline in The New York Times says it all:

“Living with the Specter of Gun Violence: 1 School, 5 Dead Students” (Rojas, 2021). Within the span of a few months, five Black teenagers from Austin-East High Magnet High School are dead, killed in separate incidents. Their young lives are extinguished by bullets, their community grieving and seeking a way forward. Sadly, this story is replicated in countless other towns as shooting deaths rise. Within the past 10 years, 30,000 children and teens have been killed in the USA by gunfire (Younge, 2021). Unlike the COVID-19 pandemic that preyed more so on vulnerable elders, this “other pandemic” is claiming the lives of vulnerable children, especially Black ones. Guns are the leading cause of death for African American children (Frazier, 2021). Our leaders share their “thoughts and prayers” but fail to take effective actions, and our legislators show no readiness to curb the ready access to guns. I write today to invite readers to share more than “thoughts and prayers”: What actions can psychiatric-mental health nurses take to combat this “other pandemic”?

Investigations are ongoing regarding the deaths of the Black teenagers in my town. In only one case were police involved. Gang wars have been blamed for earlier tragic deaths in our town, when bullets were fired from cars and “stray bullets” struck people sitting on porches. But gang activity has not been identified as the causative factor in the most recent tragedies. It seems that armed teens are shooting each other, but not always with intentionality. In one case, the shooting by one teen of his companion was purely accidental; in another, the death was thought to be the result of a “stray bullet” rather than deliberate. What is not being discussed is why these Black youth, some as young as 14 or 15, feel that they need to carry lethal weapons. Is it solely because of fear, fearing that they must be ready to defend themselves because the other kids are armed? Or perhaps because the gun in their pocket also conveys a sense of power that is otherwise unavailable to them? I heard an NPR interview several years ago in which the young man spoke, almost as a lover would speak, as he fondled the gun in his pocket. He described the smooth, cool, feel of the gun as he caressed it. I have never forgotten the sound of his voice.

I do not want to confine this discussion to gun violence of Black teens, because it is White teens who perpetrated the mass shootings of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School and at high schools in Colorado and Florida. It was a 14-year-old White boy whose shooting rampage at a South Carolina school caused lasting psychological trauma to Ava Olsen, a 7-year-old child profiled in the new book Children Under Fire: An American Crisis by John Woodrow Cox (2021). This book reminds us that the societal impact of gun violence extends well beyond the children who are killed and impacts children of all races. Thousands of young people have lost a friend to gun violence or witnessed a shooting. Psychiatric-mental health nurses are seeing these children, who have anxiety, depression, chronic sorrow, and post-traumatic stress syndrome. Moving stories of two such children are told in Cox’s book, one of them being Ava Olsen, so traumatized by the shooting of her best friend that this first-grader could no longer go to school.

I want to close by describing some grassroots movements and community organizations that generate hope, both for achieving more enlightened gun laws and for interventions that are working with vulnerable youth. For example, gun reform is passionately advocated by survivors of gun violence, such as Gabby Giffords (who founded the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence) and the students at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High school (who fled from the carnage at their school and then demanded that the country listen to their voices). New Yorkers Against Gun Violence received extensive coverage in a recent magazine article by Ian Frazier (2021). Highlighted in the article was Shaina Harrison, who teaches anti-gun-violence classes in New York City high schools. She herself grew up in a neighborhood where gunshots were heard all the time. She admits to the kids that she got in 17 fights in high school. In the Anger to Advocacy program, she teaches the teens that guns do not make them safer, and that they are not powerless. She takes them to the state capital in Albany and to Washington, DC, to meet with elected officials and advocate for gun reform.

Also featured in the Frazier (2021) article is a nonprofit organization called Guns Down, Life Up (GDLU), led by James Dobbins, whose “street cred” comes from serving two prison terms. The GDLU program helps victims of gun violence find alternatives to retaliation and helps kids in high-gun-violence neighborhoods envision a future beyond drug-dealing. Activities for the kids include bicycling around the city, recording rap music, and making bright green hoodies and T-shirts with the Guns Down, Life Up slogan.

I believe that the voices of psychiatric-mental health nurses must be raised in support of more restrictive state and federal firearm laws. As noted by Flaskerud (2019) in her column for this journal, researchers found that more restrictive state legislation was associated with decreases in unintentional, pediatric, suicide, and overall firearm-related fatality rates (over 15 years of data analyzed by Resnick et al.) Legislation alone, of course, cannot address the multiplicity of factors that have propelled the increase in shootings of our nation’s children. I invite manuscripts that focus on any and all facets of this pandemic. A child is being shot every hour in America (Younge, 2021). Share what you are doing to contribute to solutions.

Sandra P. Thomas, PhD, RN, FAAN, Editor
College of Nursing, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Knoxville, Tennessee, USA
[email protected]