This article first appeared on MindSite News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
When it comes to gun violence in the world’s richest countries, the United States is by far the deadliest. Yet a program that has shown surprising success in reducing handgun carrying and violence among young adults is squarely in the Trump administration’s crosshairs: Head Start, the free, federally funded preschool program for low-income children that is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year.
This April a leaked document from the White House to the Department of Health and Human Services called for the elimination of the entire Head Start program. After a National Head Start Association campaign prompted rallies, 52,000 signatures on petitions and more than 300,000 positive letters to Congress, the program was saved from the chopping block – at least for the time being. But it is not yet out of the woods; the Trump administration and DOGE moved to close five of the 10 regional offices for Head Start and advocates fear that more cuts are coming.
This is especially frustrating to advocates because scientists have long documented links between high-quality early childhood education programs, including Head Start, and improved outcomes later in life, such as those related to academic achievement, employment, depression, substance use and crime. What’s new, though – especially at a time when gun violence is high on the national radar – is that Head Start has been linked with a reduced risk of gun violence in later life.
A ‘striking finding’
In a recent study, researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle found that young Black men who had attended a Head Start preschool rather than other childcare were 23% less likely to carry handguns and 21% less likely to engage in serious fighting as young adults. The study, published in April in Health Affairs Scholar, is the first known piece of research to establish a link between preschool and reduced gun use in later life, according to lead author Julia Schleimer, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington’s School of Public Health and Firearm Injury & Policy Research Program.
“This is a striking finding, considering that Black males bear a vastly disproportionate burden of interpersonal gun violence in the United States,” Schleimer wrote in a blog for the Rockefeller Institute of Government think tank in New York. “The findings also suggest that Head Start reduces racial disparities in gun violence.”
International data comparisons are revealing: The United States has more guns than people, and we use them to kill people at a rate far greater than any other industrialized country. An average of 132 people died from firearm injuries per day in 2022 – one every 11 minutes – while gun suicides continued to rise and claimed 27,300 lives.
Indeed, the annual gun death rate in the United States is so far higher than any other industrialized country as to make it a complete outlier – more than 340 times higher than that of the United Kingdom, according to United Nations data.
‘One of the great untold stories in gun violence prevention’
Head Start has been in operation since 1965 and was started as part of the War on Poverty under President Lyndon Johnson.
Schleimer’s interests in the links between programs like Head Start and gun violence prevention grew as part of her work with the UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program, headed by Dr. Garen Wintemute, who called the Head Start research “one of the great untold stories in gun violence prevention.”
As a research data analyst for the program since 2018, Schleimer found numerous studies that made clear that “gun violence is a symptom of social disadvantage in many ways,” she told MindSite News in an interview.
Since high-quality early childhood education programs and other investments have helped level the playing field for marginalized communities, that suggested to her that Head Start and similar programs “could actually be effective in reducing the risk of violence, even though they were not designed with that goal in mind,” Schleimer said.
Head Start’s downstream impact on violence
By helping children deal with trauma or helping buffer them against it, “these programs could have a downstream impact on violence,” she said. “When we invest in children and families and help them have the resources that they need to thrive, that actually is preventive against violence, including gun violence.”
Considering the human and financial toll of mass shootings, firearm suicides and other gun violence, a preschool program that both educates and helps inoculate young children against gun violence might seem like a highly cost-effective and humane investment – not an example of waste.
But despite Head Start’s record teaching language and math skills and providing social-emotional learning, immunizations, and free high-quality child care that allows low-income parents to work – as well as this new evidence that it reduces the threat of gun violence – the Trump administration targeted it for elimination earlier this year. A leaked memo from the Office of Management and Budget sent to DHHS called for its elimination.
Getting rid of the Head Start program was a goal of Project 2025, the Heritage Institute project that the American Civil Liberties Union calls “a roadmap for how to replace the rule of law with right-wing ideals.” And in April, the Trump administration asked Congress to end funding for Head Start, a request buried in a 64-page draft budget.
Washington state Head Start shutdown
That same month, more than a dozen Head Start classrooms were temporarily shut down in Washington State because their funding had not arrived. Although the classrooms eventually received the funding, teachers and families are still on edge. In April of this year the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, charging that it had “slashed 60 percent of the Office of Head Start staff, closed half of the regional offices where staff with local knowledge worked, (and) delayed funding necessary for payroll and rent.” The lawsuit declares that only Congress – not the president – has the power to shut down the program.
Between the lawsuit and the nationwide outcry over Head Start’s planned elimination, the program escaped the chopping block. The National Head Start Association is also sponsoring Project STAND For Head Start this summer to mobilize further support for the program. However, given the Trump administration’s gutting of other government programs, advocates are concerned that other cuts may be looming ahead.
Schleimer’s Head Start study investigated violence in the United States as both a public health and public safety problem.
“As research increasingly recognizes that gun violence is rooted in part in early life adversity and opportunity, interventions such as high-quality early childhood education could be considered not only as a tool for learning and development, but also as a strategy to help prevent gun violence in the long run,” Schleimer wrote in her blog.
How the study was done – and what’s next
In 2022, when the study was written, homicide was a leading cause of mortality, accounting for nearly 25,000 deaths – and nearly 80% of them involved firearms. That year, firearms still surpassed car crashes and disease as the leading cause of death for children and teens, counting both homicides and suicides. Black children and teens suffered an inordinate share of those deaths, dying of gunfire at a rate 20 times higher than their white counterparts, according to a John Hopkins analysis of 2022 data.
In many cases, interpersonal violence stems from having unequal opportunities and power or being discriminated against in areas such as housing, Schleimer and her team noted. That, in turn, leads to “concentrated poverty, restricted access to resources, and increased exposure to environmental hazards and trauma.”
All this disproportionately affects young Black men from disinvested communities, researchers wrote. For example, “exposure to trauma and environmental hazards can alter brain development and increase hypervigilance,” as well as undermine emotional regulation – all things that increase the risk of violence. In Schleimer’s study, sub-populations other than Black men did not show the same correlation with Head Start, suggesting the program may fill gaps for those who need it most.
The retrospective study used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, a survey of civilians born between 1980 and 1984. The surveys were taken annually from 1997 to 2011, then every other year through 2021. Researchers who collected the data interviewed youth and their parents in English or Spanish, asking whether the child had attended Head Start, other childcare or were cared for at home, and if so, at what ages. The youth were also asked whether they had carried a handgun, been involved in serious fighting or charged with assault at age 12 and older.
Finding a reduced risk of handgun carrying and serious fighting among young Black men who attended Head Start as children was a compelling reason to support “early-life investments in the social, economic, and human capital of structurally disadvantaged children and families,” the study concluded.
As part of her dissertation, Schleimer is continuing her research by investigating the potential intergenerational benefits of Head Start – that is, whether there are spillover benefits for the children of parents who attended Head Start.
“This is an area that I would like to focus part of my career on as a scholar and researcher because it has significant potential to improve population health, safety, and wellbeing,” she said. “Stark inequities in violence in the United States and the conditions that fuel it are not the natural state of the world. They have been created, and—as suggested by this work and the work of many others—they can be changed.”
