Black children bear brunt of gun assaults in U.S. cities during pandemic: study

NEW YORK, March 28 (Xinhua) -- Gun assaults in four U.S. cities doubled across all racial groups during the COVID-19 pandemic, but spiked more severely for Black children, WHYY, the leading public media organization in the Philadelphia Region, on Monday cited a national study.

Black children are 100 times more likely than white children to be victims of gun assault, according to a study this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The disparity between Black and white children victimized by shootings widened during the COVID-19 pandemic, defined in the study as between March 2020 and December 2021.

During that period, 34 out of 100,000 Black children had suffered a fatal or non-fatal gun assault annually, compared to 0.34 of 100,000 white children.

Prior studies have shown that Black children were more likely than white children to be exposed to gun violence in their neighborhoods, and that disparity also increased during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Boston University study is based on 2,672 shootings that occurred in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago.