Jun 4, 2022 3 min read

The quiet of a Sunday afternoon in downtown Pittsburgh was shattered last weekend when 18-month-old De’Avry Thomas was shot and killed in a drive-by shooting near Market Square, an area that typically sees hundreds of people walking through it on a busy weekday.

Thomas was not the intended target when the fusillade of bullets pierced the Jeep Wrangler he was in. Those bullets were instead meant to kill someone else in the vehicle. The child’s death is surely a deeply felt tragedy for his family, but it is unfortunately not a unique one in the United States.

In the two decades since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, 37,000 children have been killed by guns in the United States. As Financial Times columnist Edward Luce pointed out last week, that far exceeds the 7,000 service personnel who died in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. And that is far from the only sobering statistic when it comes to the toll guns have taken on children. A research letter published in April in the the New England Journal of Medicine found that firearms were the leading cause of death for young people between the ages of 1 and 19, surpassing motor vehicle fatalities. Black and Hispanic youth have seen the greatest increase in gun deaths.

Think about this, too: More children die as a result of gunfire in the United States every year than on-duty police officers.

Some of them die, like Thomas, when someone else is the target. Some die randomly and senselessly, like the children at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, or at Sandy Hook Elementary School, or Columbine High School, or any of the other schools that are now known in every corner of the country for the horrors that unfolded within them. Some die as a result of the carelessness of their elders, who keep loaded weapons in their homes and don’t properly store them.

Yet our lawmakers remain paralyzed when it comes to making any meaningful laws that might reduce the number of children whose lives are cut short by guns. More than a couple of our elected officials have suggested that “good guys” with guns can stop “bad guys” with guns, like in some 1950s Technicolor Western. But the good guys are often woefully outgunned by the bad guys, who can purchase weapons designed for the battlefield with relative ease. Then there are those who suggest teachers need to be ready to fire back if a school shooter interrupts their geography or math lessons. Sorry, but having guns present in any form in classrooms hardly seems like a recipe for making them safer.

All these alleged “solutions” are just skirting the real issue, which is that too many guns are available too readily in the United States. Until we take steps like reinstituting the assault weapons ban, instituting stringent and universal background checks, and preventing those convicted of violent crime from buying guns, the carnage is bound to continue.

We claim we care about our children. Yet we are letting many languish in poverty. We are making the world our children will inherit less habitable. And we are letting too many be shot.

You have to ask if we really care as much about children as we claim to.