Why We Spent a Year Reporting on Child Gun Deaths

In Parkland, kids who endured the unspeakable emerged with a blunt message for the grownups of America: You are failing us. Their frustration was initially and primarily directed at elected officials in Washington and state capitals around the country, but it also extended to the media. Standing alongside their peers from Chicago, St. Louis, and the District of Columbia, they accurately criticized journalists for mobilizing to cover mass shootings while devoting relatively little attention to the chronic gun violence that exposes children in some city neighborhoods to danger every day.

“Since Parkland” was conceived as an antidote to that imbalance — one powered by young people themselves.

Over the summer, more than 200 teen reporters from across the country began working together to document the children, ages zero to 18, killed in shootings during one year in America. The stories they collected go back to last February 14, the day of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, when at least three other kids were fatally shot in incidents that largely escaped notice. As the weeks went on, the stories came to include children lost to school shootings, as well as to armed domestic violence, drug homicides, unintentional discharges, and stray bullets. The stories do not include victims killed while fatally injuring someone else or in police-involved shootings, nor children who died in gun suicides, for reasons explained here.

As this site goes live on February 12, 2019, the student journalists are still working to report on the cases that continue to come in. The project is intended as work in progress, and we ask your help in completing it. To share a photo or a memory of a young person memorialized here, please email sinceparkland@thetrace.org. Please also reach out with any corrections, or to notify us of a victim we may have missed.

The reporting you will read in “Since Parkland” is journalism in one of its purest forms — revealing the human stories behind the statistics — carried out on an exhaustive scale. Several partners supported the teen journalists in making it possible. The Trace, a nonprofit news organization dedicated to reporting on gun violence, worked with journalism teachers to provide the students with training and editing. Another nonprofit, the Gun Violence Archive, maintains the running count of shooting incidents from which the project team identified child victims. The Miami Herald provided additional research, several of its journalists reported stories building on the students’ work. The Herald’s siblings in the McClatchy newspaper group contributed stories in their areas. NowThis translated the project to video. Global Student Square helped us recruit more than 100 of the student reporters.

Ultimately, however, “Since Parkland” exists because of the doggedness of the young people who took it on. This was their story to tell, and it is told in their voices.

Through their determination, we have gained an unprecedented account of the full scale and contours of gun violence as it impacts American children.