How are Washington kids still getting guns, despite strict laws?

Guns in schools

Kvistad said her office also noticed a trend connecting chronic absenteeism and serious violent crimes among youth. These youth are more high-risk and more likely to commit a felony with a firearm.

School plays a significant role in reducing this risk, since youth are supervised for most of their day. However, many schools’ safety responses to guns deal only with active shooter situations like Columbine or Parkland.

“That is the more traditional assessment model, but what we are seeing now is a sort of different type of violence. I would say it’s more reactive violence,” Kvistad said. “If you see a fellow student carrying a gun, aren’t you more likely to carry a gun because it would make you feel safer? As it becomes normalized at school, we see an increased trend where it’s more likely a kid would feel like they needed it for protection to show up at school.”

Kvistad’s team notifies schools when students that have committed a felony in King County are released. The team informs the schools about conditions of release, which sometimes include attending school, not possessing weapons, abiding by a curfew and engaging in assessments and treatments. The team also shares information like copies of charge documents and a summary to inform the school of threat assessment and protective factors for that child.

Paul Patu, co-founder of nonprofit Urban Family, which provides youth mentorship and other violence-prevention services, echoed others’ claims that social media has increased youth accessibility of guns and made it trendy. Building firearms at home has also become a social media trend. “They’re building these guns and they’re finding out how to build them on YouTube, TikTok, so on,” Patu said.

He said youth today have become normalized to guns through social media and popular first-person-shooter video games.

“This has been normalized to the point of it being embedded in the psyche that having a gun and shooting someone is not as bad as it looks, right?” Patu said. “A young person has more access to guns and drugs than they do to get a summer job and other needed resources. That’s backwards, and if we don’t change that, the trend is going to continue to get worse.”

Patu and his wife Shantel grew up in the Seattle area. Paul attended Rainier Beach High School and Franklin High School, and Shantel, co-founder and executive director of Urban Family, attended Chief Sealth High School. Both said the level of youth violence they’re seeing now is higher than in previous decades. In the ’80s and ’90s, Seattle experienced gang violence and territorial disputes. A turning point came in the early 2000s, when the number of deaths due to gun violence accelerated.

Shantel said Urban Family lost at least 10 children in a year in the early 2000s, and that number jumped to 26 in 2010.

“When we speak to kids who carry guns, or who have access to guns, [what they say] is that they don’t feel safe without one and that’s what the bigger problem is,” Shantel said.

Urban Family said parents can train and teach children not to resort to gun violence, but the culture that surrounds guns in the U.S. isn’t helping because it contributes to the desensitization of possessing a firearm.   

A balanced approach of immediate intervention and support services is how Urban Family responds when they find a child carrying a gun. The organization created the 4 Peace community safety campaign for youth who find themselves in a situation involving guns.

In such situations, they say, it’s important for youth to stay alert to their surroundings and seek safety to a secure location. They encourage youth to report suspicious activity to authorities, and the final step is to create a sense of community by supporting one another.

“A child who does not feel embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. And our kids are burning down Seattle right now because they don’t feel embraced,” Shantel said. “They don’t feel like the schools care about them. They don’t feel like they can go into a community center and can be there. There’s no spaces for kids anymore in our communities.”

Nathan Hale High School sophomore Leo Falit-Baiamonte, 15, echoed this sentiment: “I feel like the [City] Council has priorities over students. They prioritize police, businesses, but they don’t prioritize us at all,” he said.

He joined the Seattle Student Union after Murphy-Paine died in the Garfield shooting.

“I feel like adults on the Council, like [Maritza] Rivera, a Councilmember, ran on the platform because their kid was at Ingraham when this shooting happened, but still they voted against the $20 million in youth mental health funding in August,” Falit-Baiamonte said.

The Seattle Student Union is hoping the Council approves the full $20 million on mental health services and gun violence prevention in Seattle schools, instead of the $12.5 million it approved in August.

“I’m scared the next shooting is going to be at my high school,” Falit-Baiamonte said.

The student-led group helped to pass legislation to ban assault weapons in the state. They plan to testify in November to the Seattle City Council to advocate for more funding to support mental health resources for students.

“When a shooting like this happens, even when it happens to a school across town, it resonates through the district,” Falit-Baiamonte said. “We’re frightened for our well-being whenever we enter the building.”  

CLARIFICATION: This version of the story clarifies how the number of gun deaths among people under 18 rose from 2022 to 2023, according to the CDC.