About This Blog

Thank you for visiting the Kid Shootings blog. 

Kid Shootings is a collaborative effort brought to you by five authors representing Ceasefire Oregon Education Foundation, Moms Demand Action, and Protect Minnesota. 

This blog highlights any and all timely cases of minors, ages 17 and under, who are involved in gun crimes or dangerous situations involving guns in the United States, which we can find reports of.  Reported cases span the whole range of incidents: homicides and attempted homicides, accidents, suicides, stray bullet reports, defensive, law enforcement, robberies, kidnappings, “near misses,” and other categories.  Some kids are shooters (including intentional and accidental), but most are victims.

Everyone can see the statistics. You can read them at the top of this blog, or in the sidebar.  Almost 3,000 kids are killed by gunfire, according to one estimate, and over 15,000 are injured. That's almost as many kids killed in just one year as the total number of American soldiers killed in combat in the entire Iraq war, and more than all allied forces (U.S. and allies) casualties in the entire war in Afghanistan. This is the real cost of our "freedom" to own guns and the lax gun regulation in America. But the huge numbers fail to register in our minds. We've grown numb to them, as a nation. This blog looks beyond the numbers to the individual cases.  Reading the circumstances of each shooting, seeing the photos of the kids, and understanding them from a more personal perspective brings home the problem of gun violence in a way that statistics do not.

The articles of gun crimes and shootings that we post mostly come from Google Alerts and keyword searches for very recent online news articles, and we have posted every single one that we could find and have time to post, whatever the circumstances of it. But they don't represent every shooting out there. Some child-involved shootings and gun crimes simply don't get reported in the media, particularly suicides (which are, of course, very personal), accidental discharges which don't actually injure anyone, or incidents in small, rural areas. And not all that are reported online are filtered to us in a Google Alert. Every time we do a "deep dive" and investigate more thoroughly, other stories pop up, and we hear stories from local law enforcement officers, crime scene cleanup professionals, and school officials which never make it to the news.

We also occasionally highlight articles that are related to kids and guns, as well as statistics.

We welcome polite and sensitive comments, and if you know of any articles involving kids and guns, please let us know with a link in a comment. 

Let’s work together to reduce kid shootings with better safety practices, public education about the dangers of children and guns, and common sense legislation to protect children.