Denver needs to get serious about youth gun-violence prevention.
Too many of our kids are dying every year at the end of a gun. Far too often that gun is fired by another teen whose life will also be shattered by that bullet.
The Denver Post’s Elise Schmelzer exposed the problem when she uncovered statistics from the Denver Police Department that indicate things might be getting worse. In 2018 and so far in 2019, 15 teenagers and children in Denver have died from gun homicides. Comparatively, in 2015, Schmelzer reported there were two kids under the age of 20 who were shot and killed, five in 2016 and four in 2017.
This is a rallying cry for our youths, the general public and our elected officials to start prioritizing this issue, which overlaps with other issues including teen suicides and school shootings. We must protect our kids from guns.
It can be done if we start making stopping gun violence a priority.
Jonathan McMillan has been on the front lines of working with Denver’s youth gang problem, and he says part of the problem is simply awareness.
“One of the things that frustrates me and that I find challenging is that unless it’s a mass shooting a lot of times youth gun violence flies under the radar,” McMillan said. “Those shootings always spark a conversation, one that needs to be had, but last year I had seven or eight kids that I had known … killed or involved in a shooting in some capacity. This is really the daily reality that a lot of families or communities are dealing with.”
So while most readers know the name of a student who was killed this year in a Highlands Ranch school shooting, few will probably recognize the name Darrell Mitchell, a 19-year-old who was shot and killed in Denver last month.
It’s time we make the conversation surrounding the violent gun deaths of all teens equally as robust and loud.
The good news is that we don’t have to start from scratch. McMillan knows there are dozens of groups doing good work in this field.
Denver Public Health released a report this month that said between 2012 and 2017 there were a total of 74 deaths due to gun violence among Denver youth who are under 25 years old. Of those 27 were suicides and 47 were homicides. And over that same six-year period there were 175 hospitalizations due to gun-related injuries. The report estimates that gun violence impacts about 700 young people every year either directly or indirectly.
“These are stable and unacceptable rates,” said Denver Public Health director, Dr. Bill Burman. “We should not as a community have to have 13 deaths a year and 700 youths affected by gun violence. Those are unacceptable.”
Burman said Denver Health’s Mile High Youth Thrive coalition, which has been around for years, is working on recommendations right now that focus on efforts to approach this issue from an incremental public health standpoint which have proven effective in other communities. We look forward to that work.
But we’d like to see the city of Denver and Denver Public Schools using their collective might to get behind such an effort too: their police, social workers, teachers and other employees are after all at the forefront of this issue and already doing good work. They are the ones who can bring our youth into the fold before tragedy strikes and patients arrive at Denver Health or teens arrive at the county jail. They are the ones who can take this fight to the neighborhoods and make this city’s children safer. They can engage non-profits so everyone is pulling in the same direction, and they can push for funding for community interventions and develop the political will for gun safety legislation.
Burman said some cities have developed a goal of not losing a single kid to guns in a year.
That should be Denver’s goal.
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