The cause of death that dare not speak its name: austerity | Gary Younge

The reasons for knife crime are complex, but it's wrong to ignore the impact of cuts to youth funding

On Monday Cedric Anderson, the estranged husband of a special education teacher, Karen Smith, walked into her primary school classroom in San Bernardino, California, and shot dead both her and eight-year-old Jonathan Martinez; injured two other children; and then fatally shot himself. Martinez was the 67th child under the age of 11 to be shot dead in America this year. (Four more have been killed since then.) Smith, who had married Anderson just a few months earlier, was just one of the estimated 50 women in the US to be shot dead by a current or former partner each month. Of the 91 mass shootings so far this year, almost one a day, all of those where the identity of the shooter is known were committed by men.

Every day in America, on average, seven children and teens are shot dead. While writing a book exploring the gun fatalities on one random day, I asked every family who I reached an open-ended question about what they thought was driving such shootings. Not a single one volunteered the answer "guns". I concluded that many I spoke to regarded guns as one might regard traffic, if your child were knocked down - as the regrettable, tragic price one pays for living in modern society, about which little can be done. Similarly, when mass shootings take place commentators will discuss a range of issues - religion, gang affiliation, mental health and race - but masculinity rarely comes up. It's simply been so factored in to our understanding of how the world works that it escapes scrutiny.

Related: Beyond the blade: marking the death of every child and teen by a knife in 2017

Related: Beyond the blade: the truth about knife crime in Britain