Gun Violence in U.S. Disproportionately Affects People Under 30

“Gun violence drastically increases during the ages of around 15 to around 29. You are much more likely to be shot either fatally or nonfat ally when you’re in that period,” said Chelsea Parsons, associate director of crime and firearms policy at the center.

Americans under 30 are 65 times more likely to die by gunfire than their British counterparts, the report states. Ironically, overall violence has been decreasing in the U.S. in recent years. Between 2003 and 2012, violent crime decreased 19 percent, but gun violence has remained persistently high.

In the U.S., an average of 33,000 Americans die by gunfire each year.

Young people are also more likely to be perpetrators of gun violence, according to the report. But the report stops short of explaining why this is so.

“One of the difficult things about doing any kind of research and policy research into issues of gun violence is that there’s not a lot of recent public health research available largely because of efforts by the gun lobby to really shut that research down,” Parsons added. “Since around 1996, the Centers for Disease Control have been unable to conduct the kind of rigorous public health and safety research on issues related to gun deaths.”

Parsons hopes the report motives stakeholders to take action.

“What we wanted to do with this report was really just to highlight the fact that when we’re talking about gun violence in the United States, we’re not talking about all populations within the country being impacted equally, and we really wanted to drive the point home that while our elected representatives may not be at a particularly high risk of gun violence, the folks they represent and the young people in their communities are, in fact, at a very high risk of being impacted by violence.”