Last summer, as she geared up to vote in her first presidential election, Gen Z voter Timberlyn Mazeikis told ABC News that there was a simple reason she was casting her ballot: “Gun violence is the leading cause of death in our generation.” The college senior had lived through the 2023 mass shooting at Michigan State University that left three people dead and five others injured.
A reader caught the news story and wrote to us, asking: “Is it true that gun violence is the No. 1 cause of death for Gen Z? And how many of those are suicides versus other types of gun deaths?”
We dug into the data.
The short answer: Yes
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s WONDER database, which collects mortality information from death certificates at the state level, firearms were indeed the leading cause of death for members of Generation Z in 2023, the most recent year with available data. That year 11,368 zoomers, people who were born between 1997 and 2012, were killed by firearms — more than died from overdoses, car accidents, and cancer.
Gen Z also appears to be the only generation to experience gun violence as the leading cause of death. Twenty years ago, the top cause of death for people of similar ages to Gen Z, 11 to 26 years old, was car accidents, according to the CDC.
In 2023, the leading cause of death for millennials was overdose (the vast majority being opioids), and for Gen X and baby boomers, it was cancer.
Homicides accounted for 58 percent of Gen Z gun deaths in 2023, followed by suicides at 38 percent. For the U.S. population as a whole, homicides accounted for 38 percent of gun deaths and suicides accounted for 58 percent in 2023, according to CDC WONDER.
Firearms have been the leading cause of death for Gen Z since 2017, when the youngest zoomers were kindergarten age and the oldest could not yet legally drink alcohol. Since 2013, when the last of Gen Z turned 1, more than 64,000 zoomers have been killed by firearms.
“For young people, it’s a combination of the availability of guns and the immaturity of adolescent brains,” said Dr. Linda Teplin, a psychiatry professor at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine who studies the mental health needs of young people involved in the justice system, explaining why the proportion of homicides is higher among Gen Z.
Gun deaths among younger people often result from interpersonal conflict, whereas gun deaths among older people are mostly suicides, said Elyse Thulin, an assistant professor at the Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention at the University of Michigan, who researches the risk of firearm-related injury among adolescents and young adults.
What is distinct about this generation, compared to generations that came before, is that zoomers are eager adopters of new technology, and that tech is playing a role in gun deaths. “Constant access to each other through our phones, social media, and even messaging can exacerbate acute and or ongoing conflicts,” Thulin said.
She pointed to apps that allow people to monitor each other’s locations in real time. “If there is a conflict that’s escalating, and you know where someone is,” Thulin said, “that’s a new piece of information that you might not have had 20 years ago.”
Gen Z currently falls within the age range at the highest risk of gun violence. (Gun deaths start dramatically rising around age 11 and peak around 23 and 30.)
A unique burden
Gen Z is the third-largest generation by population size — baby boomers make up the second-biggest portion — but with the second-highest number of gun deaths, it’s punching above its weight in terms of gun violence. In raw numbers, the generation that bears the highest gun violence burden is the one with the greatest share of the population: millennials. Guns killed 14,070 millennials in 2023.
While interpersonal gun violence has risen over the last decade among Gen Z, car crashes have decreased. “Motor vehicle injury was for a long time a very major cause of death for children,” Thulin said. “And we’ve seen changes in policy and technology, as well as our roads, trying to improve the safety of driving and improve the safety of children.”
At the same time, firearm fatalities among children have been going up, surging in the last decade. That rise has not been met with the widespread adoption of gun safety laws.
Race and poverty play a role, too. Teplin said that income inequality, which continues to widen, exacerbates youth gun violence just as much, if not more, than the growing proliferation of guns. The burden, she said, is less about Gen Z as a whole than it is about the social factors that contribute to gun violence.
“This story is not about the increase in firearm deaths across the board in youth,” Teplin said. “It’s about firearm deaths among poor and minority youth.” Teplin continued: “The story is what is driving gun violence.”
