In January, a 15-year-old was fatally shot at the Teen Life Center in West Seattle. In July, 13-year-old bystander Jayda Woods-Johnson was fatally shot in Alderwood Mall in Lynnwood after a fight broke out between two groups of teens. police said. And just last month, two teenagers were arrested in connection with shooting two 16-year-olds and an adult, who died, at a house party in Sumner.
Prosecutors and activists say that without access to firearms, some of these shootings could have been fistfights.
Washington ranks ninth in the country for gun-law strength, according to Everytown for Gun Safety this year, making it one of the strictest states. The Legislature passed a law earlier this year which requires gun owners to report stolen firearms to law enforcement within 24 hours or face a fine of up to $1,000.
Yet despite Washington’s relatively strict gun laws, children are still obtaining guns.
In the past school year, the King County prosecuting attorney’s juvenile office said about 100 students were convicted of a felony, and the office notified their schools. Of these notifications, “every single one of them” was firearm-related, according to Jamie Kvistad, King County senior deputy prosecuting attorney in the Juvenile Division and lead of the Safer School Strategy program.
What the numbers say
Juvenile-crime referrals are low compared to past decades, but the rate of violent crime among juveniles is higher — even higher than in 2019, pre-pandemic.
“We are seeing more of these serious felonies committed with firearms, but I would say that is not a surprise if you look at national data as well,” Kvistad said.
A survey by the National Center for Education Statistics found in the 2021-2022 school year, among 5,000 K-12 public schools, 10 out of 100,000 students brought guns to school in the U.S. This rate is higher than in any other school year in the past decade, which saw two to seven possessions per 100,000 students.
In 2022, over 48,000 people died from gun violence — an average of 132 people a day, or one death every 11 minutes — according to a report by the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at Johns Hopkins University.
Youth ages 1 to 17 made up 2,526 of those deaths.
In 2022, guns were a leading cause of death among children and teens, causing more deaths than car crashes, overdoses or cancer, the report found. The average was seven young people dying every day from firearms, which accounted for 30% of all deaths among teens aged 15-17.
Black youth also experienced higher rates of gun violence: More than half (55%) of all Black teens ages 15-17 who died in 2022 were killed by a gun.
Provisional data from the CDC says gun deaths nationwide among children under 18 rose from 2,542 in 2022 to 2,581 in 2023.
Washington shows similar statistics. Gun violence has been the leading cause of death for children and teens in the state from 2015 to 2019, according to CDC data, and people are more likely to die from being shot by a firearm than in a car accident.
A report from the Alliance for Gun Responsibility, a Washington-based advocacy group, states that young people are more likely to die from unintentional shootings, domestic violence or suicide by firearms than from mass school shootings. Suicide among young people accounted for more than half of all youth firearm deaths in the state, and Black children and teens are twice as likely to be killed than their white counterparts.
Children under 18 access guns in many ways. One way is stealing firearms that aren’t secured properly. Another is to access the supply of untraceable “ghost guns” or modify guns into machine guns through 3D printers.
Kvistad also said social media also plays a large role in connecting buyers and sellers under the table.
“There’s this firehose of firearms that are coming into our communities and we have got to shut off that supply side of it,” said Ryan Disch-Guzman, chief of staff at the Alliance for Gun Responsibility.
He said one way to stop guns getting into the hands of kids is to ensure that adults with firearms are practicing safe storage. The organization has held events in urban and rural areas, and donated close to 2,000 lockboxes for people to stow their firearms properly.
“Gun violence affects every single community in Washington,” Disch-Guzman said.
“I’ll talk to parents, and they will say ‘My child went on a playdate today and I had asked if the parents had a firearm and whether it was securely stowed,’ because they are experiencing their kids going on playdates and seeing firearms right in people’s homes, knowing where they are and knowing they have access to them,” Disch-Guzman said. “That’s a terrifying conversation for any parent, but one that I think most parents understand because of how many firearms are out there,” Disch-Guzman added.
Disch-Guzman emphasized the need for more mental health counselors and social workers in schools to help aid the issue of what happens when a kid encounters a gun.
He said mixing children who are still developing mentally and emotionally with a firearm is a “recipe for disaster.”
Parents are talking
A few months after Garfield student Murphy-Paine died, Mayor Bruce Harrell and Seattle Public Schools announced a $12.5 million program meant to focus on helping middle and high school students. The plan is to hire 42 new mental health counselors and care coordinators; invest in community-based partners and upgrade schools by upgrading cameras; install control systems to allow access into school buildings, perimeter fencing and gates and interior locks for classroom doors.
The Seattle Police Department will also participate by patrolling the areas around high schools at critical times (before class, at lunch and after school) on five campuses: Rainier Beach, Garfield, Chief Sealth International, Franklin and Ingraham.
“We’re finally talking about it. I don’t have the words to articulate how frustrating it is that Amarr had to die for us to have these conversations,” said Alicia Spanswick, co-president of the Garfield PTSA. She has two kids that attend Garfield, a junior and a senior, ages 16 and 17.
“We’re anxious preparing for school, trying to be proactive and prepare the kids to be traumatized. They’re still traumatized, they haven’t had time to fully process this trauma,” said Darnesha Bowman, a member of the Central District Public Safety Accountability group. A longtime resident of the Central District who now lives in Shoreline, she has many mentees and godchildren who attend Garfield, and has coached the drill and step team for about 24 years.
Spanswick said some students bring guns to school not because they’re afraid at school, but because they feel unsafe between campus and their home. She has been trying to convince the school district to bring back student resource officers (SROs) on campus to get to know students and protect them from future gun violence incidents.
The Garfield High School PTSA created its own Safe Schools Action Plan after Murphy-Paine’s death, which calls for additional security personnel, a trauma response team, creating an online school option and calling for a Seattle police presence on and around campus at certain times of day.
Bowman is skeptical, and said she feels like the school district is punishing students and parents for their push for an indefinite halt to using school officers on campus in 2020. “People need to be held accountable, because this is the result of them dropping the ball and not carrying it and having lip service and talking. I’m tired of all of these plans,” Bowman said. “I’m tired of all these new [promises]: ‘We’re going to shift funding here for mental health, this is the new plan. It’s always a new plan, but there’s never any action taken.”
Spanswick is also unsure how the city is going to implement safety measures and mental health resources beyond the first day of school. While she is behind spending funds on mental health, she questioned how the district would implement new counselors for one-on-one services with students.
Guns in schools
Kvistad said her office also noticed a trend connecting chronic absenteeism and serious violent crimes among youth. These youth are more high-risk and more likely to commit a felony with a firearm.
School plays a significant role in reducing this risk, since youth are supervised for most of their day. However, many schools’ safety responses to guns deal only with active shooter situations like Columbine or Parkland.
“That is the more traditional assessment model, but what we are seeing now is a sort of different type of violence. I would say it’s more reactive violence,” Kvistad said. “If you see a fellow student carrying a gun, aren’t you more likely to carry a gun because it would make you feel safer? As it becomes normalized at school, we see an increased trend where it’s more likely a kid would feel like they needed it for protection to show up at school.”
Kvistad’s team notifies schools when students that have committed a felony in King County are released. The team informs the schools about conditions of release, which sometimes include attending school, not possessing weapons, abiding by a curfew and engaging in assessments and treatments. The team also shares information like copies of charge documents and a summary to inform the school of threat assessment and protective factors for that child.
Paul Patu, co-founder of nonprofit Urban Family, which provides youth mentorship and other violence-prevention services, echoed others’ claims that social media has increased youth accessibility of guns and made it trendy. Building firearms at home has also become a social media trend. “They’re building these guns and they’re finding out how to build them on YouTube, TikTok, so on,” Patu said.
He said youth today have become normalized to guns through social media and popular first-person-shooter video games.
“This has been normalized to the point of it being embedded in the psyche that having a gun and shooting someone is not as bad as it looks, right?” Patu said. “A young person has more access to guns and drugs than they do to get a summer job and other needed resources. That’s backwards, and if we don’t change that, the trend is going to continue to get worse.”
Patu and his wife Shantel grew up in the Seattle area. Paul attended Rainier Beach High School and Franklin High School, and Shantel, co-founder and executive director of Urban Family, attended Chief Sealth High School. Both said the level of youth violence they’re seeing now is higher than in previous decades. In the ’80s and ’90s, Seattle experienced gang violence and territorial disputes. A turning point came in the early 2000s, when the number of deaths due to gun violence accelerated.
Shantel said Urban Family lost at least 10 children in a year in the early 2000s, and that number jumped to 26 in 2010.
“When we speak to kids who carry guns, or who have access to guns, [what they say] is that they don’t feel safe without one and that’s what the bigger problem is,” Shantel said.
Urban Family said parents can train and teach children not to resort to gun violence, but the culture that surrounds guns in the U.S. isn’t helping because it contributes to the desensitization of possessing a firearm.
A balanced approach of immediate intervention and support services is how Urban Family responds when they find a child carrying a gun. The organization created the 4 Peace community safety campaign for youth who find themselves in a situation involving guns.
In such situations, they say, it’s important for youth to stay alert to their surroundings and seek safety to a secure location. They encourage youth to report suspicious activity to authorities, and the final step is to create a sense of community by supporting one another.
“A child who does not feel embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. And our kids are burning down Seattle right now because they don’t feel embraced,” Shantel said. “They don’t feel like the schools care about them. They don’t feel like they can go into a community center and can be there. There’s no spaces for kids anymore in our communities.”
Nathan Hale High School sophomore Leo Falit-Baiamonte, 15, echoed this sentiment: “I feel like the [City] Council has priorities over students. They prioritize police, businesses, but they don’t prioritize us at all,” he said.
He joined the Seattle Student Union after Murphy-Paine died in the Garfield shooting.
“I feel like adults on the Council, like [Maritza] Rivera, a Councilmember, ran on the platform because their kid was at Ingraham when this shooting happened, but still they voted against the $20 million in youth mental health funding in August,” Falit-Baiamonte said.
The Seattle Student Union is hoping the Council approves the full $20 million on mental health services and gun violence prevention in Seattle schools, instead of the $12.5 million it approved in August.
“I’m scared the next shooting is going to be at my high school,” Falit-Baiamonte said.
The student-led group helped to pass legislation to ban assault weapons in the state. They plan to testify in November to the Seattle City Council to advocate for more funding to support mental health resources for students.
“When a shooting like this happens, even when it happens to a school across town, it resonates through the district,” Falit-Baiamonte said. “We’re frightened for our well-being whenever we enter the building.”
CLARIFICATION: This version of the story clarifies how the number of gun deaths among people under 18 rose from 2022 to 2023, according to the CDC.