Black, Hispanic, and Asian children experienced substantial spikes in firearm assault injuries during the first 21 months of the pandemic, a new study shows.

White children did not experience an increase in firearm assault injuries at all.

Gun violence—and racial disparities in gun violence—have increased substantially during the pandemic, particularly among children. The new study shows just how stark these differences in risk of firearm injury are between white and non-white children.

Published as a research letter in JAMA Network Open, the study examined gun injuries among children in four major US cities—New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia.

Pre-COVID, non-white children already experienced a disproportionate burden of gun violence compared to white children. Then during the pandemic, this disparity in risk of being shot nearly quadrupled between Black and white children.

Compared to white children, Black children were 100 times more likely to experience firearm assaults, as of December 2021—up from 27 times more likely before the pandemic. Similarly, the risk of firearm injury tripled between Hispanic children and white children, and nearly tripled between Asian children and white children.

While previous research has documented racial disparities in gun violence among children and across all age groups, the researchers say that the extent of the disparities revealed in these new findings, with no change in firearm injury rates among white children, was quite stark and unexpected.

“This was a striking finding,” says corresponding author Jonathan Jay, assistant professor of community health sciences at Boston University School of Public Health and director of the Research on Innovations for Safety and Equity (RISE) Lab.

“We knew there were large overall increases in firearm injury rates and we hypothesized that the increase was disproportionately concentrated in children of color, but we would have expected some increase among white children and we saw none. I think that speaks to the extent to which white children, on average, are insulated from gun violence exposure by social advantage and neighborhood context.”

Jay, senior author Jessica Simes, and colleagues examined firearm assault data from 2015 to 2021 among the three most populous US cities, as well as the city with the highest firearm assault rate among a population of one million or more (Philadelphia).

Read the full article about racial gaps in gun violence against kids by Jillian Mckoy at Futurity.