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April was one of the worst months for gun violence against Memphis children. Fourteen children were shot at parks, festivals, memorials, and in front of schools; seven died from their wounds. The last time that many children were killed by guns in a single month — November 2023 — was at the tail end of the deadliest year on record for Memphis children, according to the Memphis Police Department.
The number of Memphis children shot has increased sharply over the past decade, per Regional One Health and Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital data. In 2009, doctors at Le Bonheur treated 23 children for gunshot wounds. In 2012, they treated 40 children. In 2017, they treated 88. And in 2023, they treated 180.
Since the pandemic, well over 200 children have been shot in Memphis each year, according to Regional One and Le Bonheur. In 2023, that number was closer to 300. While gun violence decreased slightly over the past year, it remains well above pre-Covid levels.
Most of these children were not engaged in illegal activity, said Dr. Regan Williams, director of trauma services at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital. Instead, they were often bystanders caught in shootings that had little to do with them, but happened to take place where they study, play, and sleep.
Williams thinks she knows what’s responsible for this increase: policy decisions, particularly the state’s “guns in trunks” law.
Memphis has long been a “perfect storm” for gun violence for three reasons, Williams said: “We don’t have common-sense gun legislation. We have a high rate of poverty, and there are a lot of guns out there.”
But “guns in trunks,” which allows Tennesseans to store guns in their cars, made things even worse, she said. FBI data shows that in the years after its passage in 2013, the number of guns stolen from cars in Shelby County rose rapidly. So, too, did the number of children Williams and other Le Bonheur doctors treated for gunshot wounds.
“A couple years after the law passed, there was an increase in the number of guns,” Williams said. “And then with the increase in guns came the increase in children being shot.”
Gunshot wounds surpassed car accidents to become the leading cause of death for Tennessee children in 2022. Firearms have remained the top killer of the state’s children ever since.
An increase in community violence
Le Bonheur has the only trauma center for children in Memphis. As such, Williams and her team treat almost every Memphian under the age of 16 with life-threatening injuries.
In the mid-2010s, they noticed something unsettling: The number of children they treated for gunshot wounds was rising. In the past, Le Bonheur doctors saw three or four children with gunshot wounds each month. Now, they might see that many in a week.
Williams has been tracking the reasons why her young patients were shot. She hopes the data will point to potential solutions to gun violence in Memphis.
“I ask what the story is for every child, so I can group things in my head,” Williams said. “I try to figure out how we educate and prevent these things from happening.”
In general, Williams thinks more children have been shot because of an increase in community violence in pockets of the city. Her patients come from all parts of Memphis, but some neighborhoods — Frayser, South Memphis, and Orange Mound among them — are overrepresented.
Le Bonheur records whether children were shot accidentally or intentionally. Accidental injuries usually come from young children shooting themselves or each other, and are typically related to gun storage, Williams said. “It’s generally a kid who’s found the gun under the bed or in a cabinet, it goes off, and someone around them gets shot.”
Children shot intentionally, by contrast, are usually injured because they live in a neighborhood with high levels of violence. “Eighty percent of the intentional injuries are drive-by shootings,” Williams said. “The victim was not really the intended target of the shooting. They just happened to be walking down the street, or they’re in their home, or they’re in a car that was shot up.”
Last year, over 70 percent of Le Bonheur’s patients were shot intentionally. When they started collecting this data in 2017, 50 percent of their patients were shot intentionally.
“Our rise in gun violence since the pandemic is related to intentional shootings,” Williams said. “These shootings are generally related to community violence.”
In other words, in recent years, more Memphis children have been shot because the neighborhoods they live in have become more dangerous.
“Guns in trunks”
Why did levels of community violence rise?
Williams’ data shows that the number of children shot initially spiked in 2017, just a few years after an amended version of guns in trunks was signed into law.
“A lot of guns started getting stolen out of cars,” Williams said. “And so I think that increased the number of guns that we had on the street.”
City of Memphis data shows that gun-related violent incidents increased in the late 2010s. This increase in gun violence made Memphis neighborhoods less safe and meant that more children were caught in the crossfire.
Stolen guns have an outsized impact on gun violence because they are more likely to be used to hurt people than other firearms, said Tamika Williams, deputy director for the city’s Office of Neighborhood Safety & Engagement. “Most likely, those guns are sold or they’re used in crimes,” Tamika Williams said.
Research shows that most acts of gun violence are committed with a stolen gun. According to FBI data, in Tennessee, a majority of guns are stolen from vehicles. In 2021, the Memphis Police Department stated that 40 percent of firearm crimes in the city involve a gun stolen from a car.
The number of firearms stolen from Memphis vehicles skyrocketed in the mid-2010s, according to a review of FBI data generated by gun safety advocacy organization Everytown.
Cities across Tennessee saw an increase in gun thefts after the passage of guns in trunks, the report showed. States without a similar law did not see such an increase.
Of all the cities in Everytown’s analysis, Memphis had the highest rate of guns stolen from vehicles.
Young people — particularly teens and young adults — are disproportionately involved in car break-ins in Memphis, Tamika Williams said. Still, adults, not children, commit the vast majority of violent gun crimes in the city, she added.
Gun violence with young perpetrators tends to be well-publicized, and as a result, there’s a widespread perception that teens are responsible for most of Memphis’ violent crime, Tamika Williams said. In reality, less than 10 percent of violent crimes in the city are committed by children.
Regan Williams echoed Tamika Williams’ sentiment.
“People commonly assume that children that are shot were doing something wrong,” said Regan Williams. “And actually, that’s not true. They are innocent bystanders in a community that isn’t safe for them, and I think that it’s our job as adults to help keep children safe.”
“A deregulatory slide”
It’s difficult to establish a link between a specific piece of legislation and gun violence, said Olivia Li, a policy expert at Everytown. Still, “there are things we know for sure,” she said. “The first is that in aggregate, the more gun safety restrictions the state has, the safer their residents are, and the less gun crime they see.”
Tennessee has been on a “deregulatory slide” on gun safety for the better part of the last decade, Li added — even as the number of Tennessee children shot by guns has increased.
In 2021, the state eliminated permits to carry concealed weapons in public, a policy “we know is dangerous” because of its impact in other states, Li said. Missouri, which eliminated permits for concealed carry several years before Tennessee, saw gun deaths rise in the years after the law’s passage.
Tennessee legislators have passed a handful of narrowly focused gun control laws, such as a recent ban on Glock switches, which can make semi-automatic firearms automatic. They have also banned people with domestic violence convictions from possessing firearms.
Still, the legislature has generally shied away from gun safety legislation. It repeatedly failed to pass a “red flag” law, which allows law enforcement to take firearms from those deemed a threat to themselves or others. During the 2025 legislative session, lawmakers declined to pass MaKayla’s Law, which would have penalized adults whose improperly stored firearms fall into the hands of children, and another bill that would have penalized those who improperly store guns in their cars.
Instead, the legislature has expanded gun access in the state. In its summary of Tennessee’s gun laws, Everytown wrote that Tennessee’s laws allow “nearly anyone in the state to carry loaded firearms in public without a background check, permit, or safety training.”
This session, lawmakers shielded gun manufacturers from lawsuits, lowered the age at which one can attain a handgun permit and cut funding to several organizations that fight gun violence in Memphis.
State Senator London Lamar fears that these policy changes will make gun violence in Memphis even worse.
“What I saw this legislative session was Republicans complaining about the rise in gun violence in our cities across the state, but passing legislation that increases the access to guns,” Lamar said in an interview.
“I don’t actually think [state Republicans] care about solving gun violence,” Lamar said. “Gunshots are the leading cause of death for Tennessee children, but they fail to protect children in this state based on the policies they have actually championed and passed.”
“It’s become normal”
Kate Robinson, a junior at Crosstown High School, grew up considering what she’d do if she were caught in a shooting. It’s an idea she talks about with an air of detachment. “I’ve accepted it,” she said. “It’s become normal.” When she hears that another young person in Memphis has been killed by someone with a gun, she no longer feels surprised, just resigned.
Gun violence remains in the back of her mind, even when she’s not actively thinking about it. Recently, she overheard a classmate scream from across the hall; she instinctively wondered if there might be a gun. In reality, that classmate was just rehearsing a play.
In the wake of The Covenant School shooting, Robinson joined a school walkout organized by Students Demand Action, the youth advocacy wing of Everytown. Last year, she officially joined the group as a student organizer, pushing for changes to Tennessee’s laws around firearms.
She and her peers advocate for “gun safety,” not “gun control,” she said — “We’re not looking to take away guns. We’re not looking to control or restrict anyone’s rights. We’re just asking people to store their guns safely.”
Robinson remains hopeful that state lawmakers will take action on gun safety. “The majority of Memphians agree with us,” she said. She suspects that a majority of Tennesseans might agree with her, too. Still, she knows that the state’s Republican supermajority is unlikely to pass the policies she’d like to see enacted anytime soon.
Robinson will continue pressing for change as long as she can — at least until she graduates from high school. She’s already decided that when she gets old enough, she’s going to leave the state entirely. “I want to go to the North,” she said. In Tennessee, “my safety isn’t prioritized.”
Rebecca Cadenhead is the youth life and justice reporter for MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. She is also a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms. Email her at rebecca.cadenhead@mlk50.com.
This story is brought to you by MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, a nonprofit newsroom focused on poverty, power, and policy in Memphis.