In 2020, over 19,000 people, including 1,376 children, were killed in gun homicides in the United States. An analysis of the deaths shows that the impact of these gun deaths on children is worse than the raw numbers suggest, reports the Washington Post. Each year, thousands of kids are hit by stray bullets, are involved in school shootings, or shoot themselves accidentally or on purpose, and many kids lose parents to gun violence.
An analysis by the Post found that 20 cities representing nearly a quarter of the nation's gun homicides in 2020 saw more than 3,600 children lose their mother or father in a shooting, not counting suicides. If extrapolated to the rest of the nation's homicides, that would mean that roughly 15,000 children lost a parent in shootings across the U.S. in 2020. Most children of gun violence victims are mentioned briefly in newspaper accounts of a shooting, while coverage seldom focuses on the immediate and long-term damage done to them when they lose a parent in such a way.