In A Decade, Firearm Deaths Among Young Black People in Rural America Have Quadrupled

The trajectory shifted most notably in 2018, when deaths among Black children and adolescents in rural communities matched rates in metropolitan areas for the first time. From there, exacerbated by the nationwide rise in gun violence during the COVID-19 pandemic, the gap worsened. The findings show a significant majority of gun deaths among Black youth in rural communities were homicides, and concentrated in the South, where about half of the region’s total population lives in what the CDC considers rural communities. It’s also the region with the largest number of Black residents in the country. 

As gun violence surges and wanes in communities nationwide, it can be difficult to parse contributing factors, and rural communities are often overlooked by researchers due to overshadowing violence in major cities and lack of resources. An extensive analysis of 10 years of Gun Violence Archive data, conducted earlier this year by The Trace, found an eerily similar trend: Thirteen of the 20 cities with the highest incidences of shootings were in the South. Between 2013 and 2024, the rate of shooting victims in places like Alabama and Mississippi was six times higher than in cities like New York or Los Angeles.

In recent years, rural residents — citing lax gun laws, systemic racism, and healthcare inequities — have demanded that more attention be paid to gun violence in their communities. For many small towns, equitable access to health care is already limited, with hospitals struggling to provide care for sparsely populated areas. 

The collision of these issues is leading to a critical point, said Stacy Grundy, a public health practitioner who grew up in Hodges Park, Illinois, a rural town that sits where the Mississippi and Ohio rivers merge. She has studied the detrimental health effects connected to the erasure of Black rurality, and has lived it. The stakes are higher in rural America, she said. 

“High rates of violence are often a symptom of a larger root cause and I always go back to economic development,” said Grundy. “Most of the kids who are interested in college move away and do not return because there is not an industry to return to, and the economic opportunities for the young people who stay are now foregone. So in these communities you have an aging population and not many opportunities for the young people who stay.”

Rural communities are less dense, and more intimate, so firearm violence can have a compounding effect. “These communities are such close-knit social networks that oftentimes you know the perpetrator’s family, as well as the victims, making it more complicated, and you feel it on different levels,” said Grundy.

The history of racial violence in rural communities is deep. These places are sparsely populated, often with long-standing mistreatment leading to negative health outcomes. “We have to ask how the places where these deaths are occurring changed over time in terms of the population and policies,” said Lind, “and how can we begin to capture the role that firearm prevalence in these areas plays in all this.”

Fairriona Magee is a public health reporter at The Trace.This article is published courtesy of The Trace.