Gun Violence: The Overlooked Crisis Affecting White Men, Children, and Veterans
Outdated narratives of gun deaths perpetuate public panic rather than policy innovation
By: Joshua Byrd and Jill McMahon
Introduction
Gun violence in America has generally been associated with urban crime and communities of color. However, this narrative is outdated and incomplete, and the messaging encompassing this epidemic is grossly inaccurate.
While homicide rates do disproportionally impact black males in metropolitan settings, the reality is that the majority of gun-related deaths in the United States are the result of suicides, primarily committed by white men and veterans. While mass shootings, including the all-too-often school shootings, are overwhelmingly carried out by and inflicted upon white children.
The true scope of gun violence extends far beyond what is commonly discussed and what may be popular today.
To effectively address this issue, the accuracy of the messaging surrounding gun violence must be examined, and the acknowledgement of who is dying, how they are dying, and why they are dying must occur.
The Silent Epidemic
Silence is not always golden. In fact, it can be dark, miserable, and filled with pain, grief, and death. There is a strange, haunting silence hanging over the heart of America — a silence that mourns our best and brightest: our veterans, our children, our future. It mourns the many middle-aged white men who have spent years building this nation into one of the greatest in the world. But their pain often goes unheard, hidden beneath headlines about mass shootings and urban homicides.
While mass shootings dominate headlines and youth firearm deaths have surged 50% since 2019, a quieter and deadlier crisis continues to escalate — suicide by firearm, particularly among white men and veterans (Hernández, 2025).
In 2023 alone, firearms claimed the lives of 2,581 children. Yet, nearly two-thirds of all U.S. gun deaths were suicides — largely overlooked in public discourse despite their staggering toll (Adams et al., 2024; Gunter, 2020). White men account for 79% of firearm suicides and 60% of all gun deaths, revealing not only the depth of the crisis but the critical need for early intervention (Brown, 2017). Veterans face even greater risk, dying by suicide at a rate 1.5 times higher than non-veterans, with firearms used in 70–75% of those deaths (Williams, 2024; Galofaro, 2023).
Suicide is often an impulsive act — 75% occur within an hour of the decision, and 25% within just five minutes — making firearm access a decisive factor in the outcome. Yet there is hope. 94% of those who survive a suicide attempt never try again (Adams et al., 2024). Among older men, declining physical health is a major trigger, highlighting the need for proactive counseling and gun safety conversations in clinical settings (Kalesan et al., 2018).
Still, the nation’s focus remains fixed on the most visible forms of gun violence, allowing this slow-burning epidemic to fester in silence.
White Children and School Shootings: The Ignored Victim
School shootings are one of the most horrific aspects of gun violence, drawing national and international attention. Yet the demographics of these tragedies are often overlooked.
A recent report reviewed over fifty years of data, and what it found was that white Americans committed 53% of the 195 mass shootings between 1966 and 2024 (Ammo.com, “Mass Shooters by Race”). During this same period, 81% of shooters who carried out attacks at K-12 schools were white, while 13% were black (Statista, V. Korhonen, 2025). A CNN review found that shootings at predominantly white schools have an average of three casualties. That's twice the average of the number of shooting victims at predominantly Black and Hispanic schools” (CNN, 2019).
This overrepresentation of white individuals among school shooters contrasts with their proportion in the general population. Yet this disparity is rarely highlighted in the media. In contrast, school shootings are often framed as isolated incidents rather than part of a larger gun violence crisis.
Within media, the scope of gun violence is often myopic and out of date, sharing the same narrative that has been reported for decades.
The landscape of gun violence has been changing rapidly. Community violence is often racialized in the media as an urban black issue, when in reality we are witnessing that many of these mass shootings are perpetrated by white males. This trauma is impacting all of America, towns big and small.
Gun Violence Is Not Just an Urban Problem
Gun violence is often framed as an urban crisis, yet a closer look at the data reveals a nationwide public health emergency, especially acute in rural communities through firearm suicides among white men and veterans.
Between 2011 and 2021, rural firearm death rates were nearly 40% higher than urban rates, largely driven by suicides (Magee, 2023). A UC Davis study showed that while urban firearm homicides declined between 2000 and 2015, rural gun suicides — particularly among white residents — rose significantly, reaching parity with urban gun death rates (Boyd-Barrett, 2018).
Veterans returning to rural or isolated areas face heightened risk due to trauma, stigma, and easy access to guns. A decade-long analysis by The Trace found that half of all shootings between 2014 and 2023 occurred outside major cities, with small towns like Selma, AL, and Clarksdale, MS, reporting higher per capita shooting rates than cities such as Chicago, IL (Storey & Freskos, 2025). Even mid-sized cities like Rochester, NY, have experienced persistent trauma due to gun violence. “It’s never just one person murdered,” noted Toni Nelson in a 2024 report. “It’s their whole family, their friends, their neighborhood” (Kieta, 2024).
Furthermore, in 21 of 33 states analyzed, rural counties had gun homicide rates equal to or exceeding those in urban areas. In South Carolina, Jasper County’s firearm homicide rate was more than twice that of Charleston (Butts, 2020).
These findings dismantle the “urban-only” narrative and reveal how such framing distorts public perception, policy priorities, and resource allocation.
Addressing firearm suicide as both a rural and veteran crisis requires community-based, trauma-informed approaches rooted in public health.
Graphic via JAMA; “Firearm Death Rates in Rural vs Urban US Counties”
The Role of the Media
The media plays a powerful but often misleading role in shaping perceptions of gun violence. Although mass shootings account for less than 0.1% of all gun deaths, they dominate coverage — overshadowing the more common realities of suicide and community violence (Swanson, 2018; Pires, 2024). Suicide, which comprises nearly 60% of gun deaths, receives disproportionately little coverage; while violence in marginalized communities is often stripped of nuance or ignored altogether (HAVI & QSIDE Institute, 2024).
Media narratives tend to focus on mental illness and sensational details, reinforcing stereotypes and stigmatizing conditions like PTSD and depression, especially among veterans (Jordan, 2022).
Research indicates that after mass shootings, media coverage often shifts responsibility to government, yet fails to highlight systemic prevention efforts like lethal means counseling or upstream risk identification (Jashinsky et al., 2017). This imbalance perpetuates panic rather than informing the public and hinders policy innovation.
By prioritizing episodic tragedies over systemic issues, the media obscures the deeper structural and health-related causes of gun violence. The dominant narratives rarely tell the stories of rural men, veterans, or those quietly suffering in silence. A reoriented media approach — focused on evidence-based solutions and broader context — could play a vital role in breaking this cycle of misunderstanding and inaction.
The New Hampshire Model: A Case Study in Prevention
In 2009, in the course of less than a week, three people bought a firearm from the same store and killed themselves within hours of the purchase. The county’s Medical Examiner’s office brought this to the attention of their mental health liaison and a small group of firearm retailers and mental health/public health practitioners. Soon they met to explore whether there is a role for gun stores in preventing suicide. This group of stakeholders was later adopted by the NH Firearm Safety Coalition.
According to information abstracted from the NH Medical Examiner's death investigation reports, among the 144 firearm suicides that occurred over a two-year period ending June 30, 2009, nearly one in ten were committed with a gun that was purchased or rented within a week of the suicide (usually within hours). The figure is likely an underestimate since two-thirds of the reports made no mention of when the gun was obtained (Ayoob, M. (2015, May/June).
With this new awareness, the NH Firearm Safety Coalition took on the Gun Shop Project. Partnering with gun shop and firing range owners, their employees, and their customers, an educational program was created to focus on firearm suicide prevention.
The outcome was that about half (48%) of gun shops in New Hampshire are displaying suicide prevention materials. Many employees have felt more confident and emboldened to spot unhealthy or suicidal behaviors, some even refusing sales and referring potential customers to support. The New Hampshire model has widened the net of awareness.
Funding for Survivors: The Forgotten Victims
It’s clear that gun violence doesn’t just impact those that stare down the barrel of a gun, or sustain physical injury. Gun violence impacts many survivors, including the neighbors who witness an event, or the family that tries to assist a victim that lives with debilitating anxiety and fear. The emotional effects of gun violence impacts treating physicians in Emergency Departments, and the clean-up crew that is tasked to make blood and body matter disappear.
The latest polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation finds a majority (54%) of U.S. adults have either personally or had a family member who has been impacted by a gun-related incident, such as witnessing a shooting, being threatened by gun, or being injured or killed by a gun. (Schumacher, S., Kirzinger, A., Presiado, M., Valdes, I., & Brodie, M., 2023).
What’s needed is acknowledgment of the full scope of gun violence, not just as an urban issue, but instead inclusive of suicide and mass shootings (primarily involving white males.) Then we can advocate more effectively for targeted funding and training to assist survivors. This isn’t about taking resources from other initiatives, but about ensuring that the physically and emotionally injured receive the support that is needed to heal, and help prevent the next violent event.
A Call to Action
Despite mass shootings commanding the spotlight, firearm suicide remains the deadliest and most overlooked form of gun violence in the United States.
White men, military veterans, and rural residents constitute the bulk of these deaths, with approximately 75% of veteran suicides involving a firearm (Galofaro, 2023; Center for American Progress, 2022; Swanson, 2018). This crisis is exacerbated by limited access to mental health care and prevalent firearm ownership in underserved regions.
To reverse these trends we need upstream, data-informed strategies. These include expanding culturally responsive mental healthcare, promoting lethal means safety, and increasing awareness of firearm access as a suicide risk factor (VA, 2023; Kutsch, 2020).
Programs like Lock. Call. Live., secure storage laws, and extreme risk protection orders (ERPO) have been shown to reduce suicides (Donovan, 2023; Swanson, 2018). Furthermore, institutions like the CDC must be empowered to collect detailed data to inform targeted intervention efforts (Weigend Vargas & Edmund, 2022).
Despite the scope of the crisis, the national focus remains on visible forms of gun violence, allowing this epidemic to continue.
This is not merely a veteran issue or a rural problem — it is a national crisis. As one expert put it, “What they reach for is the greatest predictor of whether they will live or die” (Galofaro, 2023).
Confronting this long-standing problem requires shifting from silence to visibility, from isolation to connection, and from reaction to prevention. The time to act with compassion, courage, and evidence is now.
References:
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Joshua Byrd, JD, is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, former deputy sheriff, and Vice President of Hawque Protection Group, a private security firm. He serves as Director of Career Services and Program Chair for the Schools of Criminal Justice and Information Technology at American InterContinental University. Joshua is the founder of TEACH US Justice and a board member of the 100 Black Men of Atlanta, where he chairs the Violence Prevention Committee. He leads conflict resolution and de-escalation trainings for youth, adults, and businesses, advancing community safety through education, policy, and public engagement.
Photo Bob Mackey Photography.
Jill McMahon, LPC, is licensed professional counselor, focusing her work on trauma and grief. She has spent 20 years specializing in suicide loss and bereavement. She is a national L.O.S.S. Team Trainer, training communities on postvention, and the nuances of responding to the scene of suicides. Jill is the best-selling author of Bulletproof: Healing After Gun Violence and Trauma. A Guide for Survivors, Caregivers, and Clinicians (Niche Pressworks, 2024).
