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Carlos Flores was 17 when he and three accomplices tried to rob a bar in Queens, N.Y., in 1981. An off-duty police officer named Robert Walsh intervened, and he was shot and killed. Mr. Flores was convicted of second-degree murder, a conviction that carried a maximum sentence of 25 years to life in prison. But because he was not the shooter, the judge gave him 21 years to life.

Mr. Flores is now 54. He has served 37 years behind bars. The last time he got written up for a disciplinary offense was when he disobeyed an order to keep the mess hall line moving. That was more than 25 years ago. A recent risk-assessment test found that his release would pose the lowest risk of danger to the public. In other words, he's the sort of person parole is designed for.

And yet for the 16 years, the New York State Parole Board has denied him parole, using its customary boilerplate language: "Discretionary release at this time," the board said in its most recent denial, last October, "would not be compatible with the welfare of society and would tend to deprecate the seriousness of the instant offense and undermine respect for the law."

Mr. Flores is being locked up not because he's a threat to society or has failed to show that he's changed, but for a crime he committed nearly four decades ago. Too often, that's the default attitude for New York's parole commissioners, even after a state appeals court in 2016 ordered the board to weigh an inmate's youth at the time of the crime in deciding whether he or she should be released.

That ruling was grounded in a revolutionary string of rulings by the United States Supreme Court, all of which have found that young people are "constitutionally different" from adults - their brains are still developing, their impulse control is weaker and their ability to change over time is greater. This means that they are less guilty than adults and that their punishment must be different, especially in the case of life sentences for those convicted of murder. The "imposition of a state's most severe penalties on juvenile offenders cannot proceed as though they were not children," the court said in 2012. They must be given "a meaningful opportunity" to get out; actual life sentences should be reserved for those few who exhibit "irretrievable depravity."

While those rulings have struck down the most severe sentences for juveniles - the death penalty and mandatory life without parole - the New York appeals court rightly extended their logic to cases in which parole is technically available but is rarely or never granted. "A parole board is no more entitled to subject an offender to the penalty of life in prison in contravention of this rule than is a legislature or a sentencing court," the state court said.

That's right, of course, but it should go further. Parole officials should, as a rule, expect to release juvenile offenders who have served their minimum sentences. If the board has evidence that an inmate continues to pose a threat to the public, it's reasonable to keep him or her locked up, but the inmate should still get future chances to show that he or she is ready to return to society.

In response to the state court's ruling, New York's Parole Board said last summer that it would start considering an inmates' youth when deciding whether to release that inmate, but it still regularly rejects people like Mr. Flores, whom no one would describe as "irretrievably depraved." On Tuesday, Mr. Flores filed a federal class-action lawsuit against the Parole Board, claiming that its knee-jerk denials of applications by inmates like him violate the Constitution. New York holds roughly 630 prisoners on indeterminate life sentences for crimes they committed before they turned 18.

New York's Parole Board has long resisted modern understandings of crime and punishment, but the failure to treat juveniles as a unique category of offender exists nationwide. A 2016 report by the American Civil Liberties Union found that in just 12 states, more than 8,300 inmates were serving sentences of effective life - meaning 40 years or more - for crimes they had committed as juveniles. In Florida in 2015, 366 people were serving juvenile life sentences. Two were granted parole. And as in the rest of the justice system, race matters a great deal when it comes to who gets harsh juvenile sentences. A study of juvenile transfers to adult courts found that black juveniles were nearly two and a half times as likely as white juveniles to be tried as adults even when controlling for factors like prior records and seriousness of the offense.

Even in states with more enlightened parole procedures, release rates of juvenile lifers are not rising as they should. Many parole commissioners cling to outmoded prejudices about offenders, and most live in fear of letting out the guy who goes on to commit another terrible crime. They churn through parole applications, sometimes conducting dozens of interviews in a single afternoon. Because they face virtually no accountability for keeping people locked up, there is no incentive to vote for release. So they pay lip service to the new rules even as they disregard them, and the public generally doesn't know the difference.

This persists despite the fact that people are far less likely to commit crimes as they get older. At a deeper level, though, parole becomes a meaningless concept if it is routinely denied in the situations where it's most called for. That's particularly true in the case of juvenile lifers. Parole boards in New York and elsewhere must not only make passing note of an offender's youth. They must, as the Supreme Court has said repeatedly, give them a real chance to show they've grown up.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page SR8 of the New York edition with the headline: New York Forgets Its Juvenile Lifers. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Opinion | New York Forgets Its Juvenile Lifers

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Carlos Flores was 17 when he and three accomplices tried to rob a bar in Queens, N.Y., in 1981. An off-duty police officer named Robert Walsh intervened, and he was shot and killed. Mr. Flores was convicted of second-degree murder, a conviction that carried a maximum sentence of 25 years to life in prison.

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In a deregulated free market, they ask, what power do we individually wield? Living in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, Hill prides himself on the rapport he has with neighbors in the local barbershops and basketball courts even as his middle-class salary undoubtedly raises their rents. In San Diego, meanwhile, Schlichtman is advised to buy a rooming house, evict the tenants and convert it to a single-family home. He is morally outraged yet knows he cannot halt gentrification: "Somebody would likely buy that house and directly displace those residents," he concludes, but not him. Even in New York, where he bunks with his Caribbean-American in-laws in Brooklyn, Schlichtman still fears he's spurring gentrification. Though not directly participating in the real estate market, just walking the streets as a white man signals to others that the neighborhood is ripe for investment.

The authors urge their fellow gentrifiers to unite with older residents in a fight for affordable housing once they move in. This, they argue, is the only way to square the irony that "many progressive activists and academics against gentrification are actually gentrifiers themselves."

CITY ON THE VERGE
Atlanta and the Fight for America's Urban Future
By Mark Pendergrast
Illustrated. 327 pp. Basic Books, $30.

Studying architecture abroad in the 1990s, Ryan Gravel came to the conclusion of many an American in Paris: Urban life is better sans automobile. Upon his return to Atlanta, he drew up a plan to turn that sprawling region, where most streets don't even have sidewalks, into something navigable by foot and light rail. Gravel's master's thesis proposed converting a decommissioned 22-mile rail loop around the city center into a streetcar line to get people out of their cars and link the city's largely segregated neighborhoods.

Most architecture theses gather dust, but not Gravel's. His optimistic New South hometown - a city that, in the words of one early-20th-century observer, "struts before the world as the liberal gateway" - took up the project and branded it the BeltLine. With philanthropists' backing, pedestrian and bicycle paths were added and over a billion dollars in private real estate funding poured in to develop properties along the route.

But as Pendergrast, an Atlanta native who now lives in Vermont, finds in his exhaustive reporting, this hopeful tale does not necessarily have a happy ending. While private development has boomed, it remains unclear when, if ever, the streetcar loop will be built. Last fall, Gravel himself resigned from the BeltLine board to protest the lack of affordable housing being constructed with the project. Given Atlanta's long history of fake-it-till-you-make-it boosterism, it's unclear whether the BeltLine will be an urban inflection point or just the city's latest "top-down 'one big project' trap."

MAKING RENT IN BED-STUY
A Memoir of Trying to Make It in New York City
By Brandon Harris
307 pp. Amistad/HarperCollins, paper, $15.99.

In a searing debut memoir, Harris, the scion of a once-prosperous African-American Cincinnati family, moves to the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn chasing indie filmmaker dreams. Living in a neighborhood with deep black roots while frequently finding himself the only nonwhite face at rooftop hipster parties, an unmoored Harris begins to mull just who his people are. When his first feature film ("Redlegs") opens to critical acclaim but commercial failure, the young filmmaker ends up supporting his kale and duck breast habit with food stamps, not knowing "what my class was anymore." No such confusion attends his race. No matter how light his skin or how green his eyes, America regularly reminds him of his second-class status.

As the "color-coded class war" of gentrification drags on, "once-interesting conversations" turn to real estate, and the dream of making art in the city becomes increasingly untenable. While Harris's perpetually unemployed rich white roommate inhabits a world where parents buy their ne'er-do-well children entire buildings to manage, "'indie film is a rich kids' game,' a rich kid had told me." For the filmmakers of his generation, "selling out had simply become a way of life."

Thankfully, memoirs have lower overhead than movies, so we still have some access to Harris's unbribed soul. With its stinging truths and inventive language, "Making Rent in Bed-Stuy" stands as a monument to what is lost when New York's low-rent underdog outer borough becomes just another county of kings.

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how to kill a city: gentrification  inequality  and the fight for the neighborhood (book)

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city on the verge: atlanta and the fight for america's urban future (book)

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making rent in bed-stuy: a memoir of trying to make it in new york city (book)

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In a deregulated free market, they ask, what power do we individually wield? Living in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, Hill prides himself on the rapport he has with neighbors in the local barbershops and basketball courts even as his middle-class salary undoubtedly raises their rents.

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Into this consequence-free environment stepped gangsters with a new tool: the Thompson submachine gun. One of the first portable and fully automatic firearms, the "Tommy gun" was a weapon of war that missed its moment, produced too late to serve in World War I. Its manufacturer, facing ruin, tried to market the gun as a self-defense weapon, aided by the fact that the Thompson was so novel the law had yet to catch up with it. In those days, Chicagoans could buy a Tommy gun more easily than they could a handgun.

The Thompson found eager buyers among the criminal class, who appreciated its lethality and the ease with which it could be concealed. Like today's AR-15, the Tommy gun enabled many of the era's most heinous crimes - from the murder of a Chicago prosecutor, William McSwiggin, in 1926 to the killing of four lawmen in what became known as the "Kansas City Massacre" of 1933. But while the Thompson empowered gangsters to kill more people more quickly, it hadn't created this crime wave - it had merely amplified it.

Solving the problem required addressing its root causes, and the private sector took the initiative. Spurred on by the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, wealthy Chicagoans hired Col. Calvin Goddard, a pioneer of forensic ballistics, to help solve the crime. Goddard successfully matched the bullets found at the scene to two Tommy guns confiscated from one of Capone's killers, in one of the earliest uses of ballistics evidence in American history. Police across the country now had a new investigative tool that has since become standard practice.

Other elite Chicagoans, giving up on paralyzed local government, pressured President Herbert Hoover for help. He responded by sending federal agents, who effected Capone's conviction for income tax evasion in 1931. That same year, voters ousted Mayor Thompson in favor of a reform candidate, Anton Cermak. The new mayor stayed friendly with certain gangsters - Chicago would only clean up so far - but Big Bill Thompson's wide-open town had begun to quiet down.

The city fathers behind these efforts were not acting selflessly. They saw how Chicago's reputation for gangsterism and violence scared off business and harmed their own interests. Public outrage forced them to act, because they couldn't afford inaction. The economic incentives for cleaning up the city had grown stronger than the corrupt ties protecting Capone.

In 1932, Americans chose a new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who supported ending Prohibition. Once in office, Roosevelt pursued a "war on crime" that included the first federal gun control law in American history: the National Firearms Act of 1934, specifically intended to keep the Tommy gun out of private hands. Denied a private market, the Thompson would fulfill its intended purpose by accompanying GI.s onto the battlefields of World War II.

Five years after the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, America's law enforcement landscape had transformed. Capone was in prison, Congress had targeted the Tommy gun, and the "G-men" of the F.B.I. were fighting crime scientifically. Partly in response to the massacre, all levels of government had made it harder to commit and get away with murder, while eliminating some underlying causes of gang violence - beginning with Prohibition itself.

We should be ashamed that the killing of criminals 90 years ago could help spur such change, while the repeated slaughter of children prompts little more than "thoughts and prayers" from lawmakers today. The story of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre shows how public outrage can create meaningful reform when the political and economic costs of inaction outweigh the inertia preserving the status quo.

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Opinion | How the St. Valentine's Day Massacre Changed Gun Laws

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Into this consequence-free environment stepped gangsters with a new tool: the Thompson submachine gun. One of the first portable and fully automatic firearms, the "Tommy gun" was a weapon of war that missed its moment, produced too late to serve in World War I.

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In the same period, an average of 517 people were killed annually in terror-related incidents. Removing 2001, when 9/11 occurred, from the calculation produces an annual average of just 31.

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Guns in the US: The statistics behind the violence

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In the same period, an average of 517 people were killed annually in terror-related incidents. Removing 2001, when 9/11 occurred, from the calculation produces an annual average of just 31.

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Mr. Trump later clarified his stance on how to best protect schools against shooting massacres:

"I want certain highly adept people, people who understand weaponry, guns" to have a permit to carry concealed firearms in schools, Mr. Trump said during his second White House meeting in two days to discuss how to respond to the shooting that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

Teachers who were qualified to handle a weapon - Mr. Trump estimated between 10 percent and 40 percent - would receive "a little bit of a bonus," he said, adding that he would devote federal money to training them.

"I want my schools protected just like I want my banks protected," the president said. ...

Mr. Trump said he was not in favor of one measure that schools around the nation have increasingly taken to defend themselves and their students against school shooters: holding drills to practice what to do.

"Active shooter drills is a very negative thing," Mr. Trump said after Pam Stewart, the Florida Department of Education commissioner, mentioned such preparations. "I don't like it. I'd much rather have a hardened school."

Mr. Trump added that active shooter drills were "crazy," and "very hard on children."

In " An Armed Principal Detained a Campus Gunman. But He's Against Arming School Staff," reporter Stephanie Saul writes:

Even before a gunman opened fire at a Florida school last week, killing 17 people, a national effort had been underway to arm and train teachers and administrators to defend against mass shootings.

That effort has gained momentum in recent days. Legislators have moved to permit concealed weapons in schools. Sheriffs' offices have offered to train school staff members in armed response.

But one assistant high school principal who survived a school shooting - after loading his Colt .45 pistol, then chasing and detaining the suspect at gunpoint - says the idea is misguided.

"Teachers have to teach, and that's what they should be doing," said Joel Myrick, the former assistant principal at a high school in Mississippi. "It doesn't matter what a pistolero you are, or think you are. You don't need to be in school in charge of protecting children."

Before Columbine, Sandy Hook or Stoneman Douglas - indeed, before school shootings became devastatingly routine - there was Pearl High School, near Jackson, Miss.

Students: Read the entire article, then tell us:

- Do you think teachers and other school staff should be armed with guns? After considering the different viewpoints from the articles and video, has your initial reaction changed or been reinforced in any way? If so, how? If not, why not?

- Think about your own school for a moment. How would you feel if you knew some adults were carrying concealed weapons?

- Melissa Cropper, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers and a former teacher, says gun training "places an unfair burden on teachers." Do you agree with this statement? Why or why not? What do you think a teacher's roles and responsibilities should include?

- In addition to arming teachers, some experts have recommended increasing police presence, hiring more security guards, and installing metal detectors, door buzzers, security cameras and barricades in schools. Others have suggested more proactive efforts, like investing in mental health counseling and peer mediation, practicing active shooter drills, and manning doors and hallways with teachers - not security guards - whom students know and trust. Which of these safety measures do you think your school should implement? Which ones would you not want to see at your school? Why?

- What other solutions would you propose to make schools safer?
Students 13 and older are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

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Should Teachers Be Armed With Guns? (Published 2018)

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Mr. Trump later clarified his stance on how to best protect schools against shooting massacres: "I want certain highly adept people, people who understand weaponry, guns" to have a permit to carry concealed firearms in schools, Mr. Trump said during his second White House meeting in two days to discuss how to respond to the shooting that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

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The nonpartisan RAND corporation just released a comprehensive study about the likely effects of gun policies on a number of different outcomes-especially death from a firearm. The conclusion? Many of the effects remain unknown because of the lack of research.

The stakes are high: People living in the United States are seven times more likely to die by homicide than if they lived in another developed country and are 25 times more likely to die in a firearm homicide. Even though mass shootings garner the most attention, they only account for half of 1 percent of annual gun deaths in the US. Of the approximately 30,000 gun-related deaths a year, more than 60 percent of them are suicides; around 2 percent of them are accidental. A 2015 Mother Jones investigation found that gun violence cost Americans $229 billion every year in medical bills, law enforcement costs, and loss of income and productivity.

"There are many reasons why people disagree about how to reduce the harms associated with gun violence," researchers wrote, "but among the biggest is disagreement about the true effects of different gun laws and regulations-gun policies-on a range of outcomes."

The RAND researchers reviewed studies on several different laws including background checks, concealed carry, and raising the age minimum to purchase a gun. They then correlated how those laws affected certain outcomes such as mass shootings, suicides, and violent crimes and categorized their findings into five areas. The first was where no studies existed. When there were studies, they evaluated them to determine if the evidence was inconclusive, limited, moderate, or supportive.

Here are some of the major findings:

There is limited evidence that:

Banning the sale of assault weapons would cause the prices of banned weapons to increase.

Concealed carry laws increase unintentional deaths and injuries or increase violent crime.

Raising the age requirements to buy firearms decreases suicide among children.

Banning individuals with mental illnesses from buying guns would decrease suicide.

There is moderate evidence that:

Banning individuals with mental illness from buying guns would decrease violent crime.

Stand-your-ground laws increase violent crimes.

Background check laws decrease suicides and violent crimes.

There is supportive evidence that:

Child-access prevention laws decrease suicides among children.

Child-access prevention laws decrease accidental and intentional self-injuries and death.

Notably, the effect of any of these laws on mass shootings was inconclusive.

The study comes after more than two decades where there has been virtually no comprehensive research on gun policy on a federal level, partly due to a freeze on gun policy research more than 20 years ago. In the mid-nineties, the CDC and other public-health professionals began talking about the the need for research on the risk of guns from a public-health perspective. The National Rifle Association pushed back, calling such research politically motivated. In 1996, Rep. Jay Dickey (R-Ark.) sponsored an amendment prohibiting the Centers for Disease Control from "advocating" for gun control and the measure passed. Years later, Rep. Dickey expressed "regret" over the restriction.

As a result, in the last decades, the federal government has only spent 1.6 percent as much on gun policy research as it has on research involving other areas with similar levels of mortality such as traffic accidents and sepsis. RAND found that of the 54 studies published since 2003, only seven reported receiving federal funding.

But the researchers are hoping to change the paucity of studies on gun violence in America. RAND president and CEO, Michael Rich wrote that he hopes the study will "spur important further research....on an issue that is as important as it is contentious."

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9 crucial facts from the largest study on gun violence in years

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The nonpartisan RAND corporation just released a comprehensive study about the likely effects of gun policies on a number of different outcomes-especially death from a firearm. The conclusion? Many of the effects remain unknown because of the lack of research.

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Contests

One of our 2017 editorial winners wrote about China's unofficial ban on Korean cultural exports, such as the boy band Exo. Credit... Starnews, via Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

The challenge is fairly straightforward. Choose a topic you care about, gather evidence from sources both within and outside The Times and write a concise editorial (450 words or less) to convince readers of your view.

Because editorial writing at newspapers is a collaborative process, you can write your entry as a team effort or by yourself. When you're done, submit it using the contest form below by Thursday, April 5, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern. Be sure to read the rules, also below, before posting.

Our judges will then use this rubric (PDF) for selecting winners to publish on The Learning Network.

As teachers know, the persuasive essay has long been a staple of high school education, but the Common Core standards seem to have put evidence-based argumentative writing on everybody's agenda. You couldn't ask for a more real-world example of the genre than the classic newspaper editorial - and The Times publishes, on average, two of them a day.

And at a time when breaking out of one's "filter bubble" is more important than ever, we hope this contest also encourages students to broaden their news diets by using multiple sources, ideally ones that offer a range of perspectives on their chosen issue.

So what issue do you care about? Gun violence? Sexual harassment? Social media? You decide.

Good luck, and please post any questions you might have in the comments. We'll answer you there.

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Note: The submission form has been removed from this page. The contest is closed.
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Video

The New York Times's editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal provides seven tips for writing an effective editorial.

To help with this challenge, Andrew Rosenthal, in his previous role as Editorial Page editor of The Times, detailed seven pointers in the video above. And we have published related lesson plans, including " For the Sake of Argument: Writing Persuasively to Craft Short, Evidence-Based Editorials," " I Don't Think So: Writing Effective Counterarguments" and " 10 Ways to Teach Argument-Writing With The New York Times," that offer additional teaching ideas.

We have also culled a list of 401 prompts for argumentative writing organized by category, to help inspire you - although, of course, you are not limited to those topics.

We encourage you to look at both our comments on last year's winners and the winning essays themselves. They can serve as excellent models, and they cover topics from active-shooter school lockdowns to Korean television shows in China.

In addition, you can watch our free, archived webinar, featuring the Op-Ed columnist Nicholas Kristof and Kabby Hong, a high school English teacher.

1. Use at least one Times source. You can write your editorial about any topic, as long as you use at least one source from The Times. That should pretty much open the whole world to you, as you may be surprised how much you can find in The Times.

Be advised that nytimes.com has a digital subscription system in which readers have access to five free articles each month, but after that you will be asked to become a digital subscriber. The Times also offers K-12 digital subscription plans for schools. But all Learning Network activities for students, including our daily writing prompts, as well as Times articles linked from them, are free, so you can access them without exceeding the five-article limit.

2. Use at least one non-Times source. But make sure that the source you use is a reliable one. We encourage you to find sources that offer different perspectives on an issue.

3. Always cite your sources. Our submission form contains a required field for entering your citations. We include an example as well, though you can use M.L.A. or A.P.A. styles, or just list the website URLs. Even if you use a print source or an expert interview, you must provide a citation. Readers (and judges) should always know where you got your evidence.

4. Be concise. The editorial must not exceed 450 words. Your title and list of sources are separate, however, and do not count as part of your 450-word limit.

5. Have an opinion. Editorials are different from news articles because they try to persuade readers to share your point of view. Don't be afraid to take a stand.

6. Write your editorial by yourself or with a group. If you are working as a team, just remember to submit all of your names when you post your entry. But please submit only one editorial per student. If you're submitting as part of a team, you should not also submit as an individual.

7. Be original and use appropriate language. Write for a well-informed audience, but include enough background information to give context. Be careful not to plagiarize: Use quotation marks around lines you take verbatim from another source, or rephrase and cite your source.

8. Submissions must be from students who are 13 to 19 years old, and they may come from anywhere in the world. Unlike in previous years, students can now use their entire name if they want.

9. All entries must be submitted by April 5 at 11:59 p.m. Easternusing the contest form above. If you have questions about the contest, feel free to post them in the comments section, and we'll respond to you there.

10. Follow these instructions if you need proof that you entered this contest. Within an hour of submitting your editorial, you should receive an email from "The New York Times" with the subject heading "Thank you for your submission to our Student Editorial Contest." If you don't receive the email within an hour, even after checking your spam folder, then you can resubmit your entry. Be sure your settings allow emails from nytimes.com.

After two attempts and waiting over one full day, if you still have not received a confirmation email, you can contact us at LNFeedback@nytimes.com with the email address you used in the contest form. Use the subject heading "Please send me an email confirmation for my editorial contest submission." Be sure to include your name and editorial title (or subject) in your email. You may have to wait up to a week for a reply.

11. We will use this rubric (PDF) to judge entries, and the winning editorials will be featured on The Learning Network.

" Writing an Editorial" Unit Plan, by Lindsay Thompson

" Reader Idea | He Said, She Said, I Say: A Researched Argument Essay," by Danielle Harms

" Reader Idea | Using an Op-Doc Video to Teach Argumentative Writing," by Allison Marchetti

" Reader Idea | Using Room for Debate to Teach Argumentative Writing and Discussion Skills," by Gerard Dawson and Justin Rex

" Reader Idea | An Argument-Writing Unit: Crafting Student Editorials," by Kayleen Everitt

Good luck and have fun. We welcome your questions and comments if we have omitted details that might be useful. Let us know how we can help.

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The Learning Network runs contests for teenagers all year long. See our full calendar.

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Our Fifth Annual Student Editorial Contest: Write About an Issue That Matters to You (Published 2018)

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Contests The challenge is fairly straightforward. Choose a topic you care about, gather evidence from sources both within and outside The Times and write a concise editorial (450 words or less) to convince readers of your view. Because editorial writing at newspapers is a collaborative process, you can write your entry as a team effort or by yourself.

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February 5, 2018

Everytown is committed to using the most comprehensive, up-to-date sources of data to measure America's unprecedented levels of gun violence. Learn more by exploring the stats below.

To calculate this, Everytown relies on a five-year-average of data from the CDC, whose National Vital Statistics System contains the most comprehensive national data, currently available through 2016."Fatal Injury Reports," Injury Prevention & Control: Data & Statistics (WISQARS), accessed December 23, 2017 http://1.usa.gov/1plXBux']

Rates of firearm injury death increase rapidly after age 12. And unintentional shootings of children and teens are underreported in the CDC data, possibly because of the difficulty of characterizing a child's intent after he or she has killed himself or a playmate with a firearm. "Fatal Injury Reports," Injury Prevention & Control: Data & Statistics (WISQARS), accessed December 23, 2017 Everytown tracks unintentional shootings involving children, which occur every 34 hours, on average. http://1.usa.gov/1plXBux']

According to a study by the Department of Justice, between 1994 and 2014, federal, state, and local agencies conducted background checks on more than 180 million firearm applications and denied 2.82 million gun sales to prohibited purchasers. To date, the background check system has blocked over 3 million firearm sales to prohibited purchasers.Karberg JC, Frandsen RJ, Durso JM, et al. "Background Checks for Firearm Transfers, 2013-2014." Bureau of Justice Statistics. http://bit.ly/2lSEIEu. Published June 2016. Accessed February 15, 2017. Data for 2015 and 2016 were obtained by Everytown from the FBI directly. Though majority of the transactions and denials reported by FBI and BJS are associated with a firearm sale or transfer, a small number may be for concealed carry permits and other reasons not related to a sale or transfer.

Black Americans make up 14 percent of the U.S. population U.S. Census Bureau. 2010. http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-06.pdf but are victims of more than half of all gun homicides."Fatal Injury Reports," Injury Prevention & Control: Data & Statistics (WISQARS), accessed December 23, 2017, http://1.usa.gov/1plXBux.

A case-control study of 11 cities found that in a domestic violence situation, the perpetrator's access to a gun increased the odds of femicide by more than five times (adjust OR=5.44, 95% CI = 2.89, 10.22).Jacqueline C. Campbell, Daniel Webster, and Jane Koziol-McLain, "Risk Factors for Femicide in Abusive Relationships: Results from a Multisite Case Control Study," American Journal of Public Health 93, no. 7 (June 2003): http://1.usa.gov/1osjCet.

Both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the FBI collect data on firearm homicides - the former from medical examiners and the latter from local law enforcement. Each data set has distinct advantages and flaws. The CDC's National Vital Statistics System records a higher percentage of all firearm deaths but fails to capture details about their circumstances, including the relationship of the perpetrator to the victim. This makes it unsuitable for measuring gun violence between people of certain relationships.

In contrast, the FBI's Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR) include details on the perpetrator and weapon but are more likely to be missing records because the FBI relies on police departments to voluntarily submit their homicide data on an annual basis. Despite these gaps, SHR data are utilized widely in the criminology community. The SHR do not include data from the state of Florida. Everytown obtained data directly from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Women killed by former dating partners (as opposed to current dating partners) are not categorized in the Florida data and are not included.James Alan Fox, "Missing Data Problems in the SHR: Imputing Offender and Relationship Characteristics," Homicide Studies 8, no. 214 (2004); and Catherine Barber and David Hemenway, "Underestimates of Unintentional Firearm Fatalities: Comparing Supplementary Homicide Report Data with the National Vital Statistics System," Injury Prevention 8 (2002).

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February 5, 2018 Everytown is committed to using the most comprehensive, up-to-date sources of data to measure America's unprecedented levels of gun violence. Learn more by exploring the stats below.

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Gun violence is a leading cause of premature death in the U.S. Guns kill more than 38,000 people and cause nearly 85,000 injuries each year. As a longtime advocate for violence prevention policies, APHA recognizes a comprehensive public health approach to addressing this growing crisis is necessary.

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Contests

One of this year's winners wrote about school lockdown drills. Related Article Credit... Alec Soth/Magnum, for The New York Times

Update | Read the work of _________ this year's 10 winners here and this year's runners-up here.
For the past four years we've invited students to write short editorials about issues they care about, and each year thousands take up the challenge.

Students often start with thoughtful questions from their own lives: Why is my school's athletic program better funded than its music program? Why do we hide in the corner of our classroom during active shooter drills? Why don't my classmates stand during the Pledge of Allegiance? And they develop sophisticated, sincere and well researched answers in response.

Students look at the nation's and world's problems and hunt for solutions - to improve the plight of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in China, for example, or to reduce recidivism rates for U.S. prisons.

We really like this contest because it asks students to look closely at their world and find something, large or small, they want to change. So, if you don't like being last in line all the time because your surname starts with "Z," then take a stand. If you want more characters in books and movies to be more like you, then write about it. If you want society to be less wasteful or more tolerant, then tell the world. Change starts with noticing, thinking critically, and starting meaningful conversations - and that's what these students have done in their editorials.

But winning this contest? It's no easy task being selected as a winner out of 7,895 entries, a record. How do you make your writing stand out from the piles of other editorials submitted to our contest - especially when you have no more than 450 words to get your point across?

Here's one way: Start strong. Grab our attention in the first few sentences, but don't take too long to state your argument.

Here's another: Pick a fresh topic, or a new angle on a popular topic, and be very clear about what you are arguing. Often when students narrow in on a specific concern, their editorial becomes more persuasive.

What else? Write with an original, confident voice and avoid formulaic language and structure. And if appropriate, acknowledge, and deftly dispatch, counterarguments.

Below, we list 10 winners, 15 runners-up and 45 honorable mentions. We also include a PDF of all the finalists, including 58 who made the cut to the third round of judging, but didn't quite reach the winner's circle.

Starting May 22, we will be publishing one of the Top 10 essays each weekday in posts that we hope you will spread on social media, hang on school bulletin boards and perhaps even use as "mentor texts" for next year's contest.

Thank you for participating - and we hope you'll take part in our Summer Reading Contest, starting June 16.

_________

Each category below lists our favorites in alphabetical order by title. Where titles were missing, we came up with our own.
Top 10 Winners
" A Psychedelic Cure?" by Reagan Briere, age 16
" In Nothing We Trust" by Francesca Kelley, age 18
" Leave the Citizens to Their TV Shows" by Yijia Hu, age 17
" Losing the Internet" by David Scharts, age 15
" Reform the Prison, Then the Prisoner" by Katherine Leonard, age 16
" Stopping Bullets With Locked Doors and Silence Is Already Pulling the Trigger" by Daina Kalnina, age 15
" The Anguish of the Rich" by Yiqi Wang, age 17
" The Asian Misnomer: What the Affirmative Action Debate Misses" by Matteo Wong, age 16
" The Collateral Damage of Defending Democracy" by Sarah Heiland, age 18
" The Missing Anthropological Exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History " by Alec Farber, age 16
_________ Runners-Up
"America First" by Safa Saleh, age 17
"America? More Like Ameri-Can't Vote" by Gianni Carcagno, age 17
"Climate Literacy: A Critical Step Toward Climate Stability" by Ella Shriner, age 14 and Hannah Witscher, age 15
"Cultural Appropriation: A Measure of Empathy" by James Chang, age 16
"Discourse Is Democracy: Allowing Uncensored Speech on College Campuses" by Abigail Hogan, age 17
"Drone Warfare: The Failing Fight Against the Modern Hydra" by Michael Levinger, age 16
"Generation Code Red" by Grace Scullion, age 16
"Humane Human Zoo?" by Ella Ward, age 15
"Paper or Plastic? How About a Paper ON Plastic!" by Melody Markert, age 17
"The Future Disintegration of American Democracy Through Athletics" by Julianne Yu, age 16
"The Case for Teaching News Literacy" by Mary Hannah Grier, age 17
"The Unspoken Alphabet Problem" by Stephanie Zhang, age 14
"The 'War on Drugs' Will Never Work; Legalization Will" by Kristina Vakhman, age 18
"There Is No Happily Ever After Without Once Upon a Time" by Bridget O'Leary, age 17
"When Will This Class Be Useful?" by Casey Stark, age 15
_________ Honorable Mentions
"#WorldChanger" by Joyce Zhou, age 17
"A Case for Impassiveness" by Lea Marchl, age 16
"A Scoop in the Right Direction" by Emma S., age 18
"AP Tests Don't Leave Enough Room for the Human Side of History" by Tom Malmgren, age 16
"Are My Shoulders Distracting You?" by Mairi Alice Dun, age 17
"Autism: Educated and Extraordinary" by Isabella Zhang, age 17
"Bittersweet" by Rena Rachlin, age 15 "Child Labor in the U.S. Today" by Jasmine Campos, age 16 and Charlotte Principal, age 16
"China Needs Silver Lining" by Wangchen Zhou, age 17
"Colleges Should Abandon Race-Based Affirmative Action to Achieve True Diversity" by Eric Davis, age 18
"Embrace the Mess" by Chi Yu, age 14
"Fast Fashion Is Destroying Our World" by Melissa Wang, age 17
"Food Stamps Need a Change" by Patrick Meara, age 17
"Governor Cuomo Frees the Plastic Bagss" by Jiayan Chen, age 17
"Help Wanted: Moderate Politicians" by Ireland Degges, age 17
"High School Should Not Just Be About Sports" by Swathi Kella, age 16
"How Far Can Post-Truth Democracy Take Us?" by Jiahe Yang, age 18
"How to Revitalize the Public Education System" by Dhara Yu, age 18
"Last Man Standing" by Kathryn Porter, age 16
"Leave Me Alone" by Celia Silver, age 17
"More Than a Morning Kick" by Emma Cary, age 16
"Multiple Choice: Not Multiple Enough" by Yi-Mei Templeman, age 17
"Picking Cotton: An Immigrant's Perspective" by Allan Njomo, age 16
"Post-Democracy" by Nadav Ziv, age 17
"Should Juvenile Offenders Receive Life Sentences Without Parole on Their First Offense?" by Tayler Gavetti, age 16
"Should Obamacare Be Repealed?" by William Pharo, age 16
"Single Payer: A Cure for America's Healthcare Woes" by Akshay Manglik, age 13
"Streaky Friendship" by Yuxin Long, age 16
"Technology: A Hindrance to Learning" by Zachary Weiss, age 17
"Teens, Technology, and The Pursuit of Happiness" by Sam Jagolinzer, age 17
"The Bluest Note" by Nicholas Dasoveanu, age 18
"The College Conspiracy" by Serenity W., age 17
"The Cost of Health Care May Be in Your Genes" by Sophia Lo, age 16
"The Demoralizing of the Elizabethan Language" by Olivia Seymour, age 14
"The Disposable Nightmare" by Tianxin Guo, age 14
"The Education Gap" by Adam Traweek, age 16 "The Environment in the Age of Trump" by Elliot Tuttle, age 17
"The Growing Problem of Screen Addiction" by Kaitlin Craig, age 16
"The Picture of Education We Must Change" by Danielle Naidrich, age 17
"Tipping the Pay Scale" by Ruhee Damle, age 14
"Untitled" by Melinda Hartz, age 16
"We Should Be Teaching Rap Music in Schools" by Jack Zuckerman, age 19
"What Do You Call Someone That Only Speaks One Language? An American." by Paige Patton, age 16
"Where Are All the Rainbows?" by Storm Viridian Murray, age 17
"Where Trump's Ban Stands Legally" by Marcus Linde, age 16
_________ And All the Finalists, Including 58 More Great Editorials That Made It to Round 3 (PDF) Judges: Amanda Christy Brown, Shannon Doyne, Caroline Crosson Gilpin, Michael Gonchar, Annissa Hambouz, Thomas Houston, Shira Katz, Willow Lawson, Linda Leavitt, Sue Mermelstein, Anna North, Roxie Salamon-Abrams, Katherine Schulten, Matt Schwarzfeld, Natlie Shutler and Kate Spence-Ado

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A Call to Action: Winners From Our Fourth Annual Student Editorial Contest (Published 2017)

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Contests Update | Read the work of _________ this year's 10 winners here and this year's runners-up here . For the past four years we've invited students to write short editorials about issues they care about, and each year thousands take up the challenge.