In the sad world of mass shootings, ages of Newton victims set them apart

It took less than an hour to kill 20 young children in Connecticut.

That’s five times as many as have been killed by guns in the District in 12 years.

Graphic

Twenty other children under age 10 who have been shot to death in the United States since Sept. 1.

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Nationwide, it has taken four months for the gun deaths of children under the age of 10 to equal the number killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Criminologists say the shootings at the school have stunned the country because they force everyone to confront the rarest and most shocking of deaths: young children killed en masse by a stranger wielding a gun at their school.

“This is an act that is literally unprecedented in the U.S. — the mass slaughter of so many children by one person,” said Richard Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. “This is a very, very unusual phenomenon.”

The Connecticut shootings “resemble more the acts of terrorists who prey on and kill large numbers of an innocent people than they do the everyday firearm killings,” Rosenfeld said.

Since September, 20 children under 10 have been killed by guns in the United States. Eight were accidental and four were domestic killings, while eight were either bystander shootings or homicides by nonrelatives. None involved schools, and only one involved an outsider who killed more than one child.

On Sept. 1, Kahlil Singleton, 8, was fatally shot in Hilton Head, S.C., while playing in his grandmother’s front yard. The boy was caught in the crossfire of a neighborhood feud involving several adults. A month later, Jorge Duran III, 3, was shot and killed by his father in the family’s apartment near Toledo, Ohio. The boy’s mother also was slain. And earlier this month, Ryder Rozier, 3, accidentally shot and killed himself in Logan County, Okla., with a gun he found on a nightstand in his uncle’s house. His uncle is an Oklahoma state trooper.

Richard Berk, a professor of statistics and criminology at the University of Pennsylania, said that young children are more at risk of being killed by someone they know than by strangers.

“These stranger killings are horrible, but [children are] more at risk from a family member or someone in their neighborhood,” he said.

Although the number of youngsters killed by guns in this country steadily inched upward from 2008 to 2010, last week’s massacre of 20 first- and second-graders at Sandy Hook remains a statistical anomaly among rampage killings.

In a study of 62 mass shootings in America since 1982 by Mother Jones magazine, only two cases involved elementary school children shot at their schools. In 1989, at the Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, Calif., a deranged man killed five children and wounded 29 before committing suicide. In 2006, a man killed five students at a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania. Three of the dead were under age 10.

James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston, said that people shoot young children because “they are the most precious members of society.”

“If your intention is to get payback for society being unfair to you, then killing children hurts the most,” Fox said.