By Rachel Swaner, Elise White, Andrew Martinez, et al., The Trace, August 2020
Despite a significant decline in violent crime nationally over the last 15 years, high rates of gun violence persist among youth in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods. In 2017, over 21,000 children and teenagers were killed or injured with a gun, and gun violence was the leading cause of death among Blacks ages 1-19 (Children’s Defense Fund 2019). Data show that young people are both the primary victims (e.g., Xu et al. 2018) and perpetrators of gun violence (e.g., Braga, Hureau & Winship 2008; New York Police Department 2015). In New York City in particular, gun violence has been increasing in specific communities, with many attributing the increase to youth gang conflicts (Sandoval 2019; Watkins 2019).
A distinctive aspect of gun involvement among youth is that young people acquire guns almost exclusively through the informal economy (Webster, Meyers & Buggs 2014). This suggests that the possession, carrying, and sharing of guns among youth is largely unregulated and untraceable, and likely eludes traditional policy interventions. Indeed, recent research has shown that federal and state age restriction laws on gun purchases by 18- to 20- year-olds have had no impact on violent crime rates (Kleck 2019). Comprehensive efforts to prevent young people from acquiring guns should start earlier, addressing the reasons why they are getting guns, not just the logistics of how they are doing so.
So, what are the reasons that urban youth acquire or use guns? Webster and colleagues’ 2014 systematic literature review reveals two enduring gaps in the research addressing this question: 1) a lack of generalizable studies of high-risk youth, and 2) little or no qualitative research designed to understand the complex situational factors related to gun use (Webster, Meyers & Buggs 2014). Prior research on gun involvement among youth has frequently suffered from sampling biases, introduced either by specifically surveying adolescent populations in schools (e.g., Sheley & Wright 1998; the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance System)—which tends toward the systematic underrepresentation of high-risk youth who are often disconnected from school—or by focusing on youth in confinement for violent offenses (e.g., Birkbeck et al. 1999; Sheley & Wright 1995)—which may overestimate the proportion of gun-related behaviors that are motivated by criminal intent or aggression. Finally, the closed-ended surveys that currently dominate research on guns cannot fully capture the complex decision-making processes that underlie gun use. Indeed, little to no qualitative research in this area has been conducted in over twenty years Chapter 1 Page 2 (Wilkinson & Fagan 1996; Fagan & Wilkinson 1998), suggesting the need for new research that is capable of reaching—and creating a safe space to elicit reflections on gun carrying from—deeply distrustful and “street”-involved young people who carry guns.
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