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Gun prevalence and teen gun carrying [excerpt]

Criminology: Washington 2004

Efforts to reduce gun involvement by the numbers of ( violence-prone) adolescents involved with guns could in principle focus on either "demand" --," the motivation for and legal consequences forof carrying a gun --, or "supply" --," the availability of guns. The formerfirst approach was adopted in Boston's well-known and apparently successful Operation Ceasefire (Braga et al., 2001). The supply-side approach, on the other hand,second has not been well tested and remains controversial. A baseline issue is whether the prevalence of guns in a community has any effect on teen involvement. While it may seem obvious to some observers that guns will be more readily available to teens in communities where guns are more common , prominent. The answer may seem obvious. Prominent scholars in this area, however, have argued that those teens who are at risk for criminal gun use are in fact unnot affected by local gun prevalence, sincebecause (1) people, including teens,those who needwant a gun for self-protection or other high-priority uses are insensitive to the time, money or risk associated with acquiring a gunone, and (2) in any case guns are sufficiently common, and underground markets are sufficiently efficient, that such people do not have much trouble acquiring guns (those who want one can easily get one (Kates and Polsby, 2000; Polsby, 1994; Wright and Rossi, 1994). We dub this perspective the "futility hypothesis," sincebecause it supports a viewmaintains that restrictions on gun markets that are intended to do not reduce the misuse are futile (of guns (Cook and Leitzel, 1996).

To date the The empirical evidence on whether prevalence matters is surprisingly limited. In their pioneering study Sheley and Wright (1995) conclude that American teens generally have ready access to guns and that feasible regulations on gun ownership or transactions would have little effect on their involvement with guns. whether they were involved with them. But that the conclusion is speculative, and not, rather than being based on a direct test such as a comparison of gun-involvement rates across jurisdictions with different levels of gun ownership. , is speculative.

In this paper we utilizeuse the 1995 National Survey of Adolescent Males (NSAM), which included items on weapons carrying and use, to conduct such a test. These data indicate that gun carrying is remarkably prevalent among 15- to 17-year-old American males — ten- 10 percent reported carrying at least once in a month — and positively associated with the individual's drug use, involvement in violence involvement, and criminal activity. Our key finding is that gun carrying byin this group the likelihood of carrying a gun increases with the prevalence of gun ownership in the community. That result obtains after controlling for individual and county-level characteristics. A plausible interpretation for why gun carrying increases with the prevalence of gun ownership