Hi,

This is Kelly Johnson, enterprise editor at KFF Health News. I'm stepping into Amy's newsletter this week to tell you about our special report on gun violence.

Firearms are the No. 1 killer of children in the U.S., and no group suffers more than young Black people. More Black boys and men ages 15 to 24 in 2023 were killed in gun homicides than from the next 15 leading causes of death combined. Adolescent gun deaths in 2022 and 2023 were double what they were in the years before the Covid pandemic, according to research by Jonathan Jay, an associate professor in the School of Public Health at Boston University.

“It has all the markers of an epidemic. It is a major driver of death and disability,” Jay said. “Gun violence does not get the attention it deserves. It is underrecognized because it disproportionately impacts Black and brown people.”

Rather than bolstering efforts to save lives, federal, state, and local government officials have undermined them, report Fred Clasen-Kelly and Renuka Rayasam, who undertook an examination of gun violence since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, a period when firearm death rates surged. 

Over decades, American politicians and regulators have put in place laws and practices that have helped enrich firearm and ammunition manufacturers — which tout $91 billion in economic impact — even as gun violence has terrorized neighborhoods already damaged by systemic disinvestment and other forms of racial discrimination.

President Donald Trump championed gun rights on the campaign trail and has received millions in political contributions from the National Rifle Association, to whose members he promised, “No one will lay a finger on your firearms.”

Emboldened in his second term, Trump has systematically dismantled public health policies that have shown promise in curbing gun violence. He is pushing to allow more guns in schools, weaken federal oversight of the gun industry, override state and local gun laws, permit sales without background checks, and cut funding for violence intervention. The Trump administration has also fired staff in the violence prevention branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The pain of these actions will be disproportionately felt in Black communities, both urban and rural. 

KFF Health News reported from Bogalusa, a small town north of New Orleans. In August 2023, less than a mile from a century-old mill that sustained generations there, 19-year-old Tajdryn Forbes was shot to death near his mother’s house.

It was just two weeks before he had planned to move away from the empty storefronts, boarded-up houses, and poverty that make this one of the most troubled places in the nation.

Naketra Guy thought about how her son overcame losing his father at age 4 and was the glue of the family. She called him “humble” and “respectful,” a leader in the community and on the football field, where he shined.

Yet he could not outrun the grim statistics of his hometown. Since the beginning of the pandemic, gun violence has shattered any sense of peace or progress there. Louisiana suffers the nation’s second-highest firearm death rate — and Bogalusa, a predominantly Black community with 10,000 residents, has seen dozens of shootings and a violent crime rate approaching twice the national average.

Repercussions from the surge will last years in Bogalusa and beyond, researchers said: Exposure to shootings increases risk for post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, suicide, depression, substance use disorder, and poor school performance for survivors and those who live near them.

“We saw gun violence exposure go up for every group of children except white children, in the cities we studied,” Jay said. “Limits on government funding into gun violence research may stop us from ever knowing exactly why.”

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