Afterschool Child Firearm Assaults: A Quasi-Experimental Analysis

Firearms are the leading cause of death among children in the U.S., with resources primarily dedicated to the prevention of school shootings. However, child firearm assault risk may surge during afterschool hours when children leave school and enter unsupervised and unstructured community spaces. The authors investigated child firearm injury risk at the afterschool transition in New York City.

Firearm assaults from the New York City Police Department and school calendars from New York City Public Schools were obtained for 2006-2023, excluding COVID-19 years. The authors fit a difference-in-differences analysis to investigate whether firearm injuries increased into the afterschool hours more on school days than on nonschool days. The authors subsequently fit a regression discontinuity design model to assess whether firearm injuries increased abruptly at the transition to afterschool. The authors used the conventional 2PM threshold for defining the afterschool transition on the basis of prior literature and used the 25th percentile of enrollment-weighted school dismissal times as a sensitivity analysis.

A total of 359 of 613 child firearm assault injuries recorded between 10AM and 6PM occurred on school days across the 2006-2023 study period (excluding COVID-19 school years). The difference-in-differences results found that the risk of child firearm injury increased by 45% (RR=1.45; 95% CI=0.95, 2.20) after the 2PM afterschool transition on school days compared with that on nonschool days, although the result was not statistically significant. The regression discontinuity design model revealed that there was also significant increase of 2.5 (95% CI=0.49, 4.41) additional child firearm injuries at the 2PM threshold, an approximately 280% increase compared with the school-day average. Results using the dismissal threshold were positive but insignificant.

Children's firearm assault risk increases substantially when they transition from the school day to afterschool. Researchers should investigate potential interventions to promote student safety during this period.