From the New York Times news section:
Homicides of Children Soared in the Pandemic’s First Year
Killings of children and teenagers under 18 increased sharply in 2020, federal researchers reported. Black communities were disproportionately affected.
By Roni Caryn Rabin
Dec. 19, 2022As the pandemic spread across the United States in 2020, the number of children who were killed rose precipitously, as did the number injured by firearms, scientists reported in two studies on Monday.
A majority of the homicides were among Black children, and almost half were among children in the southern United States. Each of those groups also accounted for most of the children brought to pediatric hospitals with gun injuries.
The rate of child homicide in the United States rose by about 28 percent in 2020, from 2.2 per 100,000 in 2019 to 2.8 per 100,000 in 2020, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found. …
Gun homicides have also risen greatly among children in recent years. In a review of recent data on firearms, The New York Times reported last week that gun homicides involving children had increased by more than 73 percent since 2018 and that the disparity in risk between Black children and others was rapidly widening.
The authors of the new study, published in JAMA Pediatrics, said the data highlighted a public health concern “warranting immediate attention.” Child homicides are “fundamentally preventable,” yet they are becoming “more common, not less,” an accompanying editorial said.
Overall, older children and boys of all ages were more likely to be victims of gun violence than younger children and girls. The C.D.C. found a decline in homicide rates overall among girls, infants and children under 6 as well as among white children, Asian or Pacific Islander children and children in the Northeast.
Homicides of younger children often occur in or near the home and are most commonly perpetrated by parents and caregivers. The homicides often are linked to child abuse and neglect and reflect the stresses experienced by families, said Dr. Elinore J. Kaufman, a trauma surgeon at University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and a co-author of the editorial accompanying the homicide study.
In the first weeks of the pandemic, it was widely predicted, not at all unreasonably, that domestic violence would soar due to people being cooped up with their loved ones. Instead, that mostly didn’t happen.
What did happen was that black-on-black shootings at black social events soared to a new plateau after George Floyd’s death launched the “racial reckoning” in which American elites announced that blacks had been oppressed by being expected to not resist arrest enough if they weren’t in the mood to be arrested. Stops of blacks declined sharply, and lowlifes started to carry their illegal handguns when they went out.
I know this and you know this, but almost none of the 7 million subscribers to the New York Times know this. They have been told over and over that the increase in shootings during the Mostly Peaceful Protest era was due in some vague, unspecified sense to the “pandemic” and “guns.”
“I don’t think we’re doing a good job of taking care of families, and it shows,” Dr. Kaufman said in an interview.
Older children and teenagers, on the other hand, were more likely to be killed in altercations with acquaintances or strangers in public places, she noted.
In other words, black teen criminals shooting each other.
Guns are more likely to be involved in these killings, and the violence reflects the deprivation that disproportionately affects Black people and other communities of color.
We aren’t going to come out and say that blacks commit vastly more gun crimes per capita than anybody else, but in case you are so evil as to let that thought intrude into your consciousness, note that it’s your fault because blacks suffer “deprivation.”
Especially don’t let it slip into your mind that the main pandemic-related reason blacks started shooting each other so much in 2020 was that stimulus checks and the rent moratorium, rather than depriving blacks, put unprecedented amounts of cash into their pockets to party and to buy guns and cars, which, along with the George Floyd Mania, is another why both kinds of black deaths of exuberance — homicides and car fatalities — skyrocketed in June 2020.
The study noted that racial segregation exposed children of color to “concentrated poverty, segregated and underfunded educational systems, environmental hazards, lack of safe play spaces and limited opportunity.”
And yet, black homicide rates and car crash deaths tend to decline during economic hard times, such as after the end of the Housing Bubble during 2006 and rise during good times, such as during the stimulus of 2020:
The researchers suggested that such inequitable living conditions might play a large role in the persistent disparities in child homicide rates.
Blacks die by homicide 4.8 times as often as Latinos, who are roughly similar in living conditions, except for the shootiness.
As a trauma surgeon, Dr. Kaufman said, she has seen the fallout of record gun violence in Philadelphia, which went up during the pandemic and has continued with little evidence of abating.
“We’re sitting at that high plateau and not seeing much in terms of improvement, except maybe a tiny bit,” Dr. Kaufman said.
Homicides in 2022 will likely be down a few percent from 2021, back near 2020 levels, but still way above the Good Old Days of 2019.
The increase in child homicides is part of a decade-long trend. Rates have been rising slowly but steadily since 2013 after declining from 2007 to 2013.
Economic hard times lead to fewer Deaths of Exuberance.
In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, the number spiked, and 2,058 children aged 17 and younger were homicide victims, up from 1,611 in 2019.
Roughly the same increase as the overall total increase. America doesn’t have a child gun-violence problem so much as it has a black gun-violence problem, but the NYT is awfully reluctant to tell the truth about that huge fact.
