Americans of all stripes want a bright future for our children, and we all want them to navigate the transition to adulthood safely. Because we care about our children, we worry about them. One of the things we worry about the most is crime: we want to protect children both from becoming victims of crime, and from perpetrating crimes against others. We worry especially about violent crime, because we know that - in a society with the world’s highest rate of civilian gun ownership - involvement in violence can be life-shattering, and even deadly.

Addressing these issues effectively means using research and evidence to inform our public policy choices, doing more of what works (and less of what doesn’t work) to keep young people and communities safe and able to thrive. It means listening to and empowering the young people and communities who suffer the most harm from crime, violence, and guns. And most critically, it means resisting the temptation to rely on stereotypes, preconceptions, and attention-grabbing anecdotes - rather than on timely, relevant, and reliable data - to shape our understanding and guide our policy choices. Taking young people and gun violence seriously has to begin with looking clearly at the facts.

Unfortunately, that has been harder than it sounds - and harder than it should be - for a very long time. Americans’ perceptions about youth, guns, and violence have been driven more by our fears than by the facts, more by anecdotes than by data. We mustn’t settle for that, especially those of us who guide public policy and shape public opinion. We all have a responsibility to do better.

That responsibility falls in a particular way on those of us who work in the youth justice field. We can’t afford to passively tolerate the persistence of misguided, data-free narratives about the young people, families, and communities we serve. And we no longer have to. New sources of data enable us to build data-driven understandings of youth violence. We can see local, regional, and national trends in violence, and identify whether youth are primarily impacted as perpetrators or as victims.

The remainder of this site examines data about youth violence collected by the Gun Violence Archive.

Thank you to The Trace, which shared this data with us and which was not involved in the analysis. You can explore the data in greater detail at The Trace. As you read and explore this data, we encourage you to think about how you might use it to inform or guide your work.