Teen gun rate nearly matches 20-24 group for first time since 1999
On a Friday afternoon in late July, a 14-year-old boy accused of assault waited at the Shelby County juvenile court in Memphis to learn whether he would be released before his 15th birthday. Standing beside him was Alexx Brent, a community public safety specialist with the violence-prevention nonprofit Heal 901, where the teenager was enrolled. As several attorneys approached Brent throughout the afternoon asking whether Heal 901 could take on their teenage clients, the organization’s three-person intervention team could not responsibly accept them all.
Brent’s situation at Heal 901 mirrors a pattern in the national data. Fatal shootings have fallen to historic lows across the country, but teenagers have not shared equally in that improvement, according to an analysis by the nonprofit newsroom the Trace and The Guardian of the most recent CDC data. The gun homicide rate among 15-to-19-year-olds has declined from its 2022 peak but remains roughly even with or above pre-pandemic levels, the analysis found. Most other age groups are now safer than they were before the pandemic.
In Tennessee, the gun homicide rate among 15- to 19-year-olds is nearly twice the national average, according to the Trace and Guardian’s analysis of CDC data. Shelby County, home to Memphis, recorded the third most teen gun homicides of any U.S. county, even though it does not rank among the 50 most populous. The South has the country’s highest gun homicide rate, with a teen rate nearly twice that of the West and three times that of the Northeast, which has the nation’s lowest rate.
The age distribution in the data reframes teenagers’ role in violence, in Memphis and nationally. Teens do not make up a majority of perpetrators or victims; that distinction belongs to people in their 20s, according to the analysis. People in their 20s and early 30s are now safer than they were in the years leading up to the pandemic. Yet for the first time since at least 1999, teenagers suffer a gun homicide rate nearly matching the highest-risk age group of 20 to 24 and higher than people in their late 20s and early 30s.
The young people who suffer the highest rates of gun violence are increasingly forced to compete for access to the diminished programs designed to reach them.
The Trump administration canceled more than $1 billion in public safety and violence-prevention funding in 2025, and millions more in Biden-era American Rescue Plan funding — which many cities used to expand anti-violence programs — is set to dry up this year. Rather than replace that canceled federal assistance, the administration has “amplified enforcement” in Memphis, according to the Trace and The Guardian, which described the city as “a ground zero for both funding cuts and force.” With the support of Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, the administration deployed the National Guard in Memphis in September 2025, increased the presence of immigration officers and created a federal taskforce which the outlets described as intended to intensify law enforcement in the city.
The cost of the Guard deployment alone is estimated at more than $300 million by the end of the year — more than 166 times the value of Heal 901’s canceled three-year grant of $1.8 million. Since the taskforce’s deployment, its officers and guardsmen have shot at least five people, killing four. In July, National Guard members shot 20-year-old Tyrin Johnson in the back in downtown Memphis; the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation is examining the case and has said Johnson was armed.
Heal 901, which takes its name from Memphis’s area code, was founded in 2018 and originally worked with teenagers in local schools. As gun violence surged in 2020, the nonprofit shifted to direct violence intervention, mediating conflicts and helping young people deemed at high risk of being shot or arrested. Its staff help participants navigate court and parole, find housing and jobs, and access mental health care. “This community, they’re resilient,” said founder K Durell Cowan. “They’re living under some of the most difficult circumstances. You’re talking about one of the most impoverished cities in this entire country.”
The squeeze on the nonprofit deepened after the Justice Department awarded Heal 901 a $1.8 million grant in 2024 to expand its violence-prevention work. In April 2025, the Trump administration terminated the grant long before it was scheduled to end. “We had to take it bare bones,” Cowan said. “In that one year, we lost a lot.” At one point, the organization was spending approximately $60,000 a month while receiving about $20,000 back. Last year, Cowan said, Heal 901 operated on a budget of less than $1 million — less than half of what he said the organization needs to operate effectively.
Cowan said Heal 901 was also in the process of receiving local funding when federal funds were cut. Grants are not an immediate cash infusion: Heal 901 signed its local agreement in November 2024, Cowan said, but couldn’t start submitting expenses for reimbursement until months later. “We didn’t have anything coming in for almost a year,” he said. “We literally survived off foundations. That’s why the team is low.”
Violence began to drop nationwide in 2022 and 2023, but Memphis moved in the opposite direction for much of 2023. In January 2023, Memphis police officers fatally beat 29-year-old Tyre Nichols, a killing that prompted widespread protests and further strained trust between police and residents. Memphis experienced another increase in killings in the months following Nichols’ death. In 2024, Memphis and Shelby County created a joint office to coordinate and help fund violence prevention, and Memphis began to feel some relief from its pandemic surge that year — months before the Trump administration deployed the National Guard and flooded the city with federal law enforcement. By 2025, the city’s homicide rate had fallen to about where it was before the pandemic.
The 14-year-old Brent was helping in court had been referred to Heal 901 from the joint office, and he was already deeply entangled in the legal system when they met. He had faced multiple assault charges, Brent said, and he picked up his latest when a woman tried to pull a gun on his mother. Brent said the boy grabbed a stick to defend her. He was no “menace to society” — his temper surfaced when people threatened him, Brent said, and his unstable home life was the larger problem.
When the 14-year-old’s case was finally called that July afternoon, his mother appeared on a courtroom screen from the women’s shelter where she was staying with her daughter and agreed to let her attorney sign her name on her son’s agreement. The judge went through the terms with Brent standing beside the boy and his public defender, placing him on probation with the condition that he continue working with Heal 901. Brent picked him up from the juvenile detention center himself. The teenager spent his birthday with friends, is now living with his godmother and recently joined his high school football team.
Brent, 41, sees himself in the young people he works with. Like many of them, he grew up in Memphis with parents who struggled with addiction, and he served time at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. After he returned home in 2020, Cowan helped him redirect his experience toward violence intervention. Brent said the most rewarding result is when a participant tells him he no longer carries a gun. “That’s what we want to hear,” he said. “Because we’ve turned a guy who could be a potential killer, and we took that out. No one is born a killer.”
Because Heal 901 is a nonprofit rather than a state agency, its workers can take a teen to an interview, pick him up from a part of town he should not be in, send money in an emergency, meet him away from an intimidating government office, and keep calling after he stops answering. Brent said he sometimes goes to court on his days off because a kid, frightened of jail, may be ready, briefly, to try something different. “What’s the best thing to do for him besides give him hope?” he asked. “Show him that somebody’s going to be there for him, but going to be on his ass at the same time.”
Bill Adkins III, a juvenile probation officer in Memphis, said the teens he supervises are often asked to meet court requirements while facing hurdles that make it hard to comply. Some have no birth certificate, social security card or any form of ID needed to get a job. Some live in overcrowded apartments, like a family of eight people sharing two bedrooms and one bathroom, he said.
Adkins once arrived at what was supposed to be a family’s home and found it abandoned. The family was living in a car outside. The child in that family was still on probation. The court expected him to complete its orders. “How is he supposed to do that?” Adkins asked.
Court officers such as Adkins face restrictions that limit how much they can get involved, even though they may know a young person needs more support. “But when you have something like Heal 901, I know they’re going to give them the support they need,” Adkins said. “Coupled with what I’m doing, it works 10 times more than if they did not exist.”
Intensive violence intervention can mean months of calls and home visits, rides to court and job interviews, meetings with relatives, help obtaining an ID or finding a missing birth certificate, and urgent conversations at night or on weekends. Without more funding and staff, Cowan said, increasing Heal 901’s caseload would be irresponsible — and unfair to his employees.
The squeeze extends beyond Heal 901. At 901 Bloc Squad, Memphis’s oldest violence-intervention group, workers have worked through furloughs and periods without pay or benefits, program director Carmen Coleman told the Trace and The Guardian. Arieale Munson, CEO and founder of Operation Taking Back 901, works with Heal 901 and other violence-intervention programs in the city through the joint office. She helps young people with financial literacy and job skills to mitigate the underlying circumstances that can push someone toward violence. She counsels young people from age 16 to 30, most of whom she said have been victims or perpetrators of gun violence. “You’re going to need some sense of support, and we’re the village that you need to lean on,” Munson said. Without work like hers, young people could get stuck in a cycle of financial insecurity, legal trouble and often violence, she said.
In early 2026, the joint office referred two teenage brothers to Heal 901 after their mother died and their father was no longer in the picture. Within about four months, the older brother, who wears an ankle monitor, had stopped leaving home without permission, attended prom and graduated high school; the younger brother stopped getting into fights and made plans to live with an aunt. The older brother, who goes by CEO K5, recently turned 18. On a Friday evening in Martin Luther King Jr Park in South Memphis, CEO K5 sat under a tent while a painter airbrushed “901” in blue across his forearm. Around him, Heal 901 workers wore bright orange shirts with “END COMMUNITY VIOLENCE” printed in big white letters. Police officers and national guard members walked the grounds, too. He was pursuing a music career, and he still had goals he was working to accomplish, like getting a job at Amazon and growing his YouTube channel, the Trace and Guardian reported. “Anything I need, they got me,” CEO K5 said of Heal 901’s staff. CEO K5 said Memphis should keep working toward its goals, too. Despite its declining gun violence, he said, there are more young people who still need help.
“It’s amazing that my city is labeled as one of the most violent in America, but we see that the solution to that violence is actually part of the community,” Cowan said. “It takes individuals who come from the community, who look like the community, to go back in and change it.”
Brent said he would not trade his work, despite the instability. “We can’t slack off,” he said. “Some organizations, they see these guys as numbers. We see these guys as people.”