On Wednesday morning, a student walked into Georgia’s Apalachee High School and opened fire with a rifle, killing two students and two instructors. The incident is numbing in its familiarity, from the weapon choice to the shooting location to the death toll. Even the most acutely emotional aspect to the story — the students reaching out to parents to offer what both feared might be their last messages — were familiar. These stories are ones we’ve heard over and over again.
Just because these elements are familiar, though, doesn’t mean they are less powerful or less important. Nor should we let the familiarity of kids endangered at school distract from a more mundane aspect of the shooting: that American kids are much more at risk from gun violence than kids in other countries. More at risk, in fact, than people in other countries in general.
Take Western Europe. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington compiles data on causes of death around the world, including in America’s peer countries in Europe. From 2004 to 2021 (the most recent year for which IHME data are available), more Europeans were killed by firearms than were American kids. But far more U.S. kids than European kids were shot to death, with five American kids dying for each European child.
In fact, several states saw more children killed by guns in 2021 than the number of kids killed by firearms in Europe that year. Georgia was among them. (Data for 2023 on the charts that follow are provisional.)
These are raw counts, not relative totals. There were 437 million residents in the countries included in IHME’s Western Europe data in 2021, about 92 million of them under age 20. There were about 262 million Americans under 18 in 2023, including about 8.5 million in Georgia that year. But more Georgia children than European kids were killed by firearms.
The states shown above are those that had the most kids killed by firearms over the last 20 years. Georgia is America’s eighth most populous state; it had the fifth most kids shot to death over that period, more than 1,400 of them.
Many of those killed by firearms in Europe took their own lives. If we exclude suicides to look only at homicides and accidental deaths, we see that fewer Europeans overall than American kids are killed by firearms. American kids are almost twice as likely as European adults to be killed by a firearm when we exclude suicides. They are nearly 22 times more likely to be killed by a firearm than Europeans under 20.
Thanks in part to a surge in shooting deaths that accompanied the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, firearms recently became the most common cause of children’s deaths in the United States. School shootings are only a small subset of those deaths. But exceptional tragedies like the one that unfolded in Georgia on Wednesday are a moment to consider how unexceptional it is when American kids are killed by firearms.