Don't focus on the kids for violence prevention

I went to a community session in Durham on developing a violence reduction plan last week. I have been to community sessions before, so I knew the likely outcome before going in – often individuals request things not directly related to violence (like clamping down on college parties). Durham was no different, with the majority of individuals saying we need more school programs.

For the bottom line up front – school programs are mostly worthless to reduce gun violence, since most individuals involved with gun violence are adults and not in school.

It was my wife who actually said something about it – she asked “are most individuals involved in gun violence actually in school?”. I knew that it definitely was not the majority (no matter how you define violence or involvement), I was just not sure what the actual number would be.

Durham PD has public data on shooting victims, and here is the breakdown of the ages for those shot in 2025:

Demographics of Shooting Victims in Durham, 2025

This ends up being 12% of the victims of gun violence are in the age range of 6 to 17 years old, the approximate age in which the kids are in school.1

We generally are more interested in the offenders for prevention (some of these victims may purely be bystanders in shootings, in which there own behavior had nothing to do with their victimization). But victimization demographics are often a good place to start, as most crime is among inter-personal groups of similar age, rage, and gender.

If we look at arrests for weapon charges across the entire US, we can get a quick age breakdown for Males from the FBI crime data explorer. Juveniles only take up 11% of weapons arrests (among all males).

Age of Males arrested for Weapons Charges, March 2021-March 2025

Either way you slice it, gun violence prevention should be focused on adults, which have around 9 times the number of individuals involved in gun violence, either as offenders or victims, than juveniles.

  1. If you want a per-capita rate, juveniles are around 1/5 of the US population, they likely also have lower per-capita rates of involvement in gun violence as well.↩︎