Youth Gun Deaths
Data on the alarming rise in gun deaths among Americans under 18, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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American gun deaths have been falling — except among kids. Tragically, guns kill more children and teenagers than any other cause, including car crashes or cancer.
To shed light on this grim trend, The Gun Violence Data Hub collected data on gun deaths among Americans under 18, which we are sharing here. This information comes from the same source as the broader CDC gun deaths data. But it is a topic we’ve heard about from several newsrooms around the country, so we wanted to make it simple for journalists and researchers to find the facts on the issue.
The Trace considers the CDC data to be the most reliable source of gun death statistics available.
The CDC collects and produces this data from death certificates submitted by each state and territory. It shows gun deaths of all types, including homicides, accidents, legal interventions, and suicides. The latter regularly make up over half of all gun-related fatalities.
There is considerable lag time, usually a full calendar year. Explore the different tables above by making a selection from the dropdown and clicking Sample to find the information you’re interested in. Downloads are available as the whole dataset, individual tables, or time- and geography-bound slices.
When the datasets here do not have a “year” field, they represent the six-year period between 2018 and 2023.
Limitations
- Lag time: Data can take over a year to be finalized. For example, 2022 information was not available until April 2024.
- Death data here is measured by the geography of the person’s residence, not where the death occurred. Deaths by place of occurrence can be queried using the WONDER tool.
- Death counts under 10 in any given combination of categories are suppressed on WONDER and not available here.
- Caution is strongly advised in using the numbers to calculate sums, averages, and so on, as values for some subsets are suppressed, missing, not available or not applicable.
- The Trace has reported that “the reliability of the CDC’s unintentional shooting death data has come under question in recent years, as studies have found that gun accidents are sometimes classified as homicides.”
- Research has found that some groups are misclassified in mortality data more than others — this is especially true in the case of American Indian or Alaska Native ancestry, and to a lesser degree for people of Hispanic/Latino and Asian American and Pacific Islander descent.
Methodology
The Trace queried the CDC WONDER online portal in February 2025. The files the CDC provides on the portal are difficult to use, so we cleaned them by removing values like Suppressed, Missing, Unreliable, or Not Applicable (the original queries can be checked on WONDER to see where those terms applied — reach out to the Hub if you need to do that for your work).
The CDC has changed the way it tracks race in recent years, so for information on race and ethnicity we focus on data from 2018 forward, using the CDC’s six “single race” categories (about which you can read more here). We did not include provisional or partial data, since those figures may change.