Southern states remain an outlier in firearm death rates. Where does Georgia fall?

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Apalachee High School students and people from the broader Barrow County community gathered for a prayer vigil in a city park after the shooting deaths of four at the school Wednesday.

Credit: Grant Blankenship/GPB News

Nationwide data on gun-related deaths among young people shows a slight decline from previous years.  

Recent data published by KFF Health News points to a rate of firearm deaths among U.S. children of 3 out of 100,000. In 2024, that amounted to the deaths of 2,228 kids.  

That’s slightly less than the previous two years, but still higher than pre-pandemic levels.  

By far, the most firearm-related deaths were a result of assault, followed by self-harm.  

“Even though there are some shared root causes of those, we do need to think about prevention strategies for them separately,” said Jonathan Rupp, professor and director of the Injury Prevention Research Center at Emory University.  

For example, at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, Rupp said screening tools for kids in the emergency room can help identify their risk of suicide and self-harm, including access to a gun. If that access exists, the hospital provides resources on safe storage. 

For prevention of gun violence, partnerships with community health workers and violence intervention groups are key.  

“There are multiple street-based programs that are going on in the city,” Rupp said. “ Some of those are school-based as well. These are generally people who are survivors of violence themselves.” 

Many of these programs that do direct outreach are federally funded, and facing an uncertain future due to cuts made last year.

"There's a lot of discussion about where we find funding to go forward," Rupp said. 

In some Southern states, the rate of kids whose death involved a gun from 2020 to 2024 is almost double the national average.  

Georgia ranks among the top 10 for states with the highest increase in youth firearm deaths over that time frame, up 68% from about seven years ago. And there are disparities. 

According to the Georgia Department of Public Health, Black youth were over four times more likely to die from assault than white youth in 2024. National trends are similar, with firearms leading to the deaths of Black children from ages 12 to 17 at almost 10 times the rate of white and Hispanic children.  

'We are a part of the solution'

At Grady Memorial Hospital, doctor Randi Smith leads a violence interruption program for children and adults.  

“And the whole idea is that we don't just take care of their bullet holes, but we focus on caring for all of them, and looking at the social and the economic and the environmental factors that may have led to their injuries in the first place,” Smith said.  

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines gun violence as a public health problem. Assessing risk includes taking all of those factors into consideration.  

Smith said the goal of violence intervention programs in hospitals and more locally is to reduce, or end, cycles of violence. At Grady, that’s measured in part by re-injury rates, or the rate of patients who return to the hospital with a violent injury.  

Grady’s re-injury rate currently stands at 3% on average, Smith said. It’s less than 2% for gun violence injuries.  

“We don't want anybody coming back in re-injured, but I think that only tells part of the story,” Smith said. “We have people who were hungry, who are no longer hungry; we have people who needed to be relocated for safety measures that are relocated. That's a win.”