On October 15, sixteen-year-old Griffin J. John II shot his way into Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon. Once inside, he opened fire in a special-education classroom, killing three children and one teacher and wounding others.

News about the cold-blooded murder of disabled children was plastered across media headlines. It’s true that children with disabilities face increased risks. A global review found that the odds of experiencing violence were roughly twice as high for children with disabilities as for their peers.

But as I read about the horror at the Bend school I wondered whether any outlets would mention the other children targeted across America for the same reason.

Every day, nationwide, abortionists end the young lives of babies who are deemed unfit for life due to some genetic discrepancy from the majority. Down Syndrome children, children with heart conditions, children with spina bifida, and children with any number of other conditions are routinely killed in utero in the United States.

For some reason, it is only when the killing is done with a pistol or a shotgun, and not a scalpel or a forceps, that newspaper reporters and television crews bother to mention it. Otherwise, the targeting of children in America has become far too routine to merit even a mention in the press.

Children in other countries are hardly any safer than their American counterparts. On February 28, 2026, American missiles rained down on the heads of children at the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran. More than 120 children were killed, including at least one unborn child.

American troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and elsewhere have also killed children. U.S.–backed sanctions imposed on Iraq in the 1990s contributed to widespread suffering, including many children. Children in Gaza have been killed with American-provided weapons. American military campaigns that have resulted in the deaths of large numbers of children. From the Korean peninsula and Japan to Southeast Asia, Europe, and Native American communities, children have been among the victims of U.S. military operations, including attacks on civilians.

In the United States, Black children in big cities get gunned down all the time. Rarely do their names make the news; if anything, a headline conveys a number, a tally of people killed over a weekend, as though it was too much work to look up who had been killed, to go ask the mothers of the murdered what had happened, and how to make it stop.

I suspect very few readers want to hear any of this. Other countries devalue the lives of children too, I expect many will say. Yes, they do. The problem is that in America, children are killed in school shootings and gunned down on neighborhood streets. And while some of these tragedies receive national attention, others pass with barely a mention.

Disabled children are the most vulnerable of all. If we Americans want to understand why violence against children persists in our country, we might begin by examining the ways our own government has failed to protect the most vulnerable—and how deeply violence against young people has become normalized in our republic.