Teenage boys shot in desert near Walmart in Victorville.

Two teenage boys were injured during a shooting in the desert near the Walmart Supercenter in Victorville.

At 7:40 a.m. on Monday, Sheriff’s Dispatch got a call about someone who ran inside Walmart in the 11800 block of Amargosa Road with a gunshot wound.

Victorville Sheriff’s Station officials said a 13-year-old boy and a 14-year-old boy were in the desert near the shopping center west of Interstate 15 a the 13-year-old boy fired a weapon, shooting himself in the hand and hitting a 14-year-old boy in the lower body.

One witness, Sylvia Lopez of Victorville, told the Daily Press that one of the injured boys ran into the Walmart to seek help.

“There was some confusion because many customers thought the shooting happened inside the store,” said Lopez, preparing to leave the store when the boy arrived on the property.

San Bernardino County Fire personnel and a medical helicopter responded to the scene. Both boys were transported to local hospitals, receiving medical treatment for non-life-threatening gunshot wounds.

Deputies located the handgun at the scene, according to the sheriff’s report.

Sheriff’s officials did not reveal how the teens were associated or why the boys had a firearm.

Firearms became the leading cause of death among children and teenagers in the United States in 2020, according to research using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released in April.

Researchers from the University of Michigan noted that an alarming number of the deaths, 10,186 (22.5%), were of people ages 1 to 19.

For more than 60 years, motor vehicle accidents have been the leading cause of deaths of young people, but since 2001, the number of those deaths has dramatically decreased. There were about 3,900 deaths in 2020. Meanwhile, firearm-related deaths have been on the rise since 2013; there was a 29.5% increase from 2019 to 2020.

"This tells us that it's a worsening problem in the U.S., and I mean the most recent data suggests that the trend is accelerating," Jason Goldstick, research associate professor at the University of Michigan and co-author of the letter, told USA TODAY.

"If you look at other countries, it's not even comparable. The risk of firearm violence in other countries is not even in in the same league as it is in the United States."

The leading cause of gun-related deaths was interpersonal violence, he said, so the number of gun-related injuries could also be higher.

Goldstick said several possible factors as to what may have caused may have contributed to the dramatic increase in deaths among young people but noted that a 2019 study by researchers at the University of California, Davis found there are more handgun injuries after spikes in handgun purchases. A survey in February 2021 found an increasing rise in the purchase of firearms after the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Patrick Carter, associate professor of emergency medicine at the University of Michigan and a study co-author, said one reason motor vehicle deaths have fallen in recent decades is research that documents ways to make highways safer despite an increase in cars on the road.

"Changing behavior, improving the vehicle's safety, improving the roads, and educating our drivers better, that's all through evidence-based-driven research," Carter said. "What we have seen with firearms is that we haven't been able to until just recently been able to apply that same type of evidence-based research to the problem of firearms."

More gun training and finding ways to keep guns away from children and teenagers might help turn the corner, he said.

"That gives me hope that we can apply those types of evidence-based findings in the same way we did for vehicles over the past 50 years to the problem of firearm deaths," he said. "We can then change and bend the curve on the number of kids dying from firearms."

Anyone with information about this investigation is asked to contact the Victorville Sheriff’s Station at 760-241-2911 or Sheriff’s Dispatch at 760-956-5001.

Callers wishing to remain anonymous are urged to call the We-Tip Hotline at 1-800-78CRIME (27463), or you may leave the information on the We-Tip website at wetip.com.

Daily Press reporter Rene Ray De La Cruz may be reached at 760-951-6227 or RDeLaCruz@VVDailyPress.com. Follow him on Twitter @DP_ReneDeLaCruz

This article originally appeared on Victorville Daily Press: Victorville teens shot in desert near Walmart