in 1992. In 1986, a majority of cases in New York City's Family Court were misdemeanors, while today more than 90 percent are felonies. Younger kids are increasingly involved in deadlier crime, as Judge Susan R. Winfield of the Family Division of the Washington, D.C. Superior Court states:
There is far more gratuitous violence and far more anger, more shooting . . . Youngsters used to shoot each other in the body. Then in the head. Now they shoot each other in the face (Lacayo 60).
Other statistics are even more frightening. Webber cites the Children's Defense Fund, which estimates that an American child is arrested for a violent crime every 5 minutes and is killed by guns every 2 hours. Nine in 10 young murder victims in the industrialized world are Americans. Between 1979 and 1991, nearly 50,000 American children were killed by guns, which is more than the number of Americans killed in Vietnam in 25 years. An American child is 15 times more likely to be killed by gunfire in the United States than is a child living in Northern Ireland. More than half the people arrested for murder in the United States in 1991 were under age 25, and juvenile arrests for murder and non negligent manslaughter rose 93 percent between 1982 and 1991. It is more and more common for young people to kill each other, and 55 percent of juvenile homicides in 1995 involved friends and acquaintances (Webber).
...