When University of Minnesota graduate student Allison Lind, in her work with runaway youth, began observing an increase in youth violence in 2020, it led to some questions about what she was seeing.
Lind started exploring public data on gun mortality rates from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. What she found took her by surprise — that the rate of firearm-related deaths among Black rural youth around the country was as high as that among Black urban youth.
“I saw this and it surprised me,” said Lind, who works with the Runaway Intervention Program at Children’s Minnesota. “I reran this multiple times, just not trusting what I was seeing.”
The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, shows that since 2013, firearm deaths have quadrupled among Black rural children and teens, mainly due to a rise in homicides. It also found that while firearm-related mortality rates increased 35% for all youth (ages 1-19) between 1999 and 2022, the greatest increase was among Black youth.
The study was co-authored with two other University of Minnesota scholars: sociology professor Elizabeth Wrigley-Field and associate professor Susan Marshall Mason of the School of Public Health.
Historically, firearm-related deaths among Black youth have been more common in urban areas than in rural ones, but, since 2018, Black rural youth have experienced firearm-related mortality rates as high as those of Black urban youth, Lind said.
Lind said the findings challenge the traditional narrative of gun violence primarily affecting urban Black urban youth; it also shows that gun violence impacting Black youth, including homicides, extends into rural areas.
“The narrative that we’re told is that firearm-related deaths are an issue that happens with Black urban youth by homicides, and then white and American Indian/Alaskan Native youth by suicides,” Lind said. “Never in that narrative is that this is also an issue of Black rural youth.”
She said that the increase in Black rural firearm mortality started around 2013 but accelerated during the pandemic, with the biggest increase being from 2019 to 2021 when it rose by 50%.
Related | Gun violence impacting Minnesota youth and young adults at higher rates
The researchers separated the data by U.S. regions and found that the largest increase in firearm mortality among Black rural youth is happening in the South. From 2020 to 2022, the rate of firearm mortality among black rural youth was higher than Black urban youth in the South. The findings showed that a majority of gun deaths among Black youth in rural communities were in the South and were homicides.
An analysis from The Trace, a nonprofit news organization that reports on gun violence, found that rural areas and large and small towns in the South have much higher levels of gun violence than similarly sized areas in other regions of the country. The same analysis showed that in Minnesota, from 2014-2023, 23% of shootings happened outside of large cities, while in states like Alabama, that figure was much higher, at 71%.
In the Midwest, Black urban youth are still dying of gun violence at higher rates than Black rural youth. But firearm mortality rates are higher among Black youth in rural areas of the Midwest, compared to their white counterparts, the study found.
In 2013, Black and white rural youth had similar percentages of firearm deaths, with firearms accounting for 12% of deaths among Black youth and 11% of deaths among white youth. In the years since then, that rate has risen dramatically among Black rural youth.
By 2022, a third of all deaths among Black rural youth were firearm-related, and the firearm-related mortality among Black rural youth was four times as high as that among white rural youth, the study found.
What does it tell us?
Lind said her next steps are pinpointing the factors that have led to this increase. She has gotten more data from the CDC on the counties in the study so she can explore what factors were at play during that timespan and whether county factors like firearm availability, socio-economic advantage, or population demographics — like a change in a county’s age structure — led to the increase.
“We know a lot of deaths happen in late adolescence, early adulthood. That’s when the most people die by firearms,” she said. “So are these counties changing in ways dealing with structural racism or disadvantage, or are they changing in (other) ways?”
One of her mentors is also working to gather data on gun morbidity – meaning injuries, not deaths. That data could paint a larger picture that could be made Minnesota-specific because there are more instances of firearm morbidity than mortality.
“Mortality is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot more people that live from gun violence than die,” she said.
A MinnPost analysis of data from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension found that gun violence in the state – defined as instances of homicides, sexual assaults, robbery, aggravated assault and carjackings that involve a handgun, rifle, shotgun or other firearm – disproportionately affects youth. In the three years from 2021-2023, people ages 18-24 made up 21.8% percent of gun violence victims — but only 8.8% of the state’s population. Youth ages 15-17 made up 6.5% of the victims, but 4% of the state’s population, the analysis found.
Ava Kian
Ava Kian is MinnPost’s Greater Minnesota reporter. Follow her on Twitter @kian_ava or email her at akian@minnpost.com.
