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Dual pathways of concealed gun carrying and use from adolescence to adulthood over a 25-year era of change
Abstract
Most homicides in the United States are committed using a handgun, but little research examines gun carrying over critical stages of the life course and changing contexts of violence. Notably, although most of the handgun homicides are committed by adults, most research on concealed gun carrying focuses on adolescents in single cohort studies. Using more than 25 years of longitudinal multicohort data from Chicago, 1994–2021, we show that pathways of concealed gun carrying are distinct between adolescence and adulthood. Adolescent carrying is often age-limited and responsive to direct exposure to gun violence (witnessing and victimization), while adult carrying is a persistent behavior that is less tied to direct exposure. The onset of concealed carry is also a strong predictor of later gun use (shooting or brandishing), and we find distinct patterns of gun use between individuals who first carry in adolescence versus adulthood. We discuss the implications of these dual pathways for research and policies on firearm use.
... The widespread shift toward "shall-issue" or permit-free carry laws has altered the legal context of gun carrying, potentially influencing age-related trends and making the distinction between legal and illegal carrying more complex. As of 2023, more than half of US states have adopted laws that make it easier for individuals to carry concealed weapons without a permit (6). This legal evolution may contribute to changes in who carries guns, at what age, and for what reasons. ...
... This behavior is typically short-lived and associated with specific developmental stages. Witnessing or being a victim of gun violence before the age of 15 doubles the likelihood of adolescents carrying guns between ages 15 and 21 (6). Personal experiences with violence create a perceived need for self-protection in dangerous environments. ...
Understanding the distinction between adolescent and adult pathways to concealed gun carrying can inform interventions to reduce gun violence.
There was a large spike in gun purchases and gun violence during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. We used an online U.S. national survey (N = 1036) to examine the characteristics of people who purchased a gun between March 2020 and October 2021 (n = 103) and compared them to non-gun owners (n = 763) and people who own a gun but did not purchase a gun during the COVID-19 pandemic (n = 170). Compared to non-gun owners, pandemic gun buyers were younger and more likely to be male, White race, and to affiliate with the Republican party. Compared to non-gun owners and pre-pandemic gun owners, pandemic gun buyers exhibited extreme elevations on a constellation of political (QAnon beliefs, pro-gun attitudes, Christian Nationalism, approval of former President Donald Trump, anti-vax beliefs, COVID-19 skepticism; mean Cohen’s d = 1.15), behavioral (intimate partner violence, antisocial behavior; mean d = 1.38), mental health (suicidality, depression, anxiety, substance use; mean d = 1.21), and personality (desire for power, belief in a dangerous world, low agreeableness, low conscientiousness; mean d = 0.95) characteristics. In contrast, pre-pandemic gun owners only endorsed more pro-gun attitudes (d = 0.67), lower approval of President Joe Biden (d = -0.41) and were more likely to be male and affiliate with the Republican party relative to non-gun owners. Pandemic gun buyers represent an extreme group in terms of political and psychological characteristics including several risk-factors for violence and self-harm.
Importance:
The past quarter-century has seen both sharp declines and increases in firearm violence in the United States. Yet, little is known about the age of first exposure to firearm violence and how it may differ by race, sex, and cohort.
Objective:
To examine race, sex, and cohort differences in exposure to firearm violence in a representative longitudinal study of children who grew up in periods with varying rates of firearm violence in the United States and to examine spatial proximity to firearm violence in adulthood.
Design, setting, and participants:
This population-based representative cohort study included multiple cohorts of children followed-up from 1995 through 2021 in the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN). Participants included Black, Hispanic, and White respondents from 4 age cohorts of Chicago, Illinois, residents, with modal birth years of 1981, 1984, 1987, and 1996. Data analyses were conducted from May 2022 to March 2023.
Main outcomes and measures:
Firearm violence exposure, including age when first shot, age when first saw someone shot, and past-year frequency of fatal and nonfatal shootings within 250 m of residence.
Results:
There were 2418 participants in wave 1 (in the mid-1990s), and they were evenly split by sex, with 1209 males (50.00%) and 1209 females (50.00%). There were 890 Black respondents, 1146 Hispanic respondents, and 382 White respondents. Male respondents were much more likely than female respondents to have been shot (adjusted hazard ratio [aHR], 4.23; 95% CI, 2.28-7.84), but only moderately more likely to have seen someone shot (aHR, 1.48; 95% CI, 1.27-1.72). Compared with White individuals, Black individuals experienced higher rates of all 3 forms of exposure (been shot: aHR, 3.05; 95% CI, 1.22-7.60; seen someone shot: aHR, 4.69; 95% CI, 3.41-6.46; nearby shootings: adjusted incidence rate ratio [aIRR], 12.40; 95% CI, 6.88-22.35), and Hispanic respondents experienced higher rates of 2 forms of violence exposure (seen someone shot: aHR, 2.59; 95% CI, 1.85-3.62; nearby shootings: aIRR, 3.77; 95% CI, 2.08-6.84). Respondents born in the mid-1990s who grew up amidst large declines in homicide but reached adulthood during city and national spikes in firearm violence in 2016 were less likely to have seen someone shot than those born in the early 1980s who grew up during the peak of homicide in the early 1990s (aHR, 0.49; 95% CI, 0.35-0.69). However, the likelihood of having been shot did not significantly differ between these cohorts (aHR, 0.81; 95% CI, 0.40-1.63).
Conclusions and relevance:
In this longitudinal multicohort study of exposure to firearm violence, there were stark differences by race and sex, yet the extent of exposure to violence was not simply the product of these characteristics. These findings on cohort differences suggest changing societal conditions were key factors associated with whether and at what life stage individuals from all race and sex groups were exposed to firearm violence.
This study updates and supplements previous reports by the Council on Criminal
Justice (CCJ) on recent U.S. crime trends with additional crime data through
December of 2022. It examines monthly crime rates for 10 violent, property, and
drug offenses in 35 American cities. The 35 cities are not necessarily representative
of all U.S. cities. Not all cities reported data for each offense, and the data used to
measure the crime trends are subject to revision by local jurisdictions.
The Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) began in the mid-1990s, using an accelerated longitudinal design and drawing a representative sample of over 6200 children from a total of seven birth cohorts (ages 0 to 18) living in Chicago. Participants were followed for a second and third wave of data collection ending in 1998 and 2002, respectively. Independent surveys and observations on Chicago neighborhoods were also conducted. In 2012, a random subsample from cohorts 0, 9, 12, and 15 was selected for further follow-up, resulting in 1057 wave 4 interviews. In 2021, a fifth wave was launched to locate and survey wave 4 respondents, resulting in 682 responses. The extension to waves 4 and 5, termed the PHDCN+, is the main focus of this cohort profile. Survey data were collected from many domains including, but not limited to, family relationships, exposure to violence and guns, neighborhood context, self-reported crime, encounters with the police, attitudes toward the law, health, and civic engagement. In addition, official criminal records were collected for 1995–2020. The resulting PHDCN+ data includes five waves of comprehensive survey data, residential histories, neighborhood contextual data, and criminal histories extending over 25 years for four cohorts differing in age by up to 15 years. The research design, measures, key findings from the cohort sequential design, and data access opportunities are discussed.
Importance:
Preventing firearm violence requires understanding its antecedents. Yet no comprehensive longitudinal study has examined how involvement with firearms during adolescence-use, access, and victimization (defined as threatened with a weapon or gunshot injury)-is associated with the perpetration of firearm violence in adulthood.
Objective:
To examine the association between firearm involvement during adolescence and subsequent firearm perpetration and ownership in adulthood among youth involved in the juvenile justice system.
Design, setting, and participants:
This cohort study analyzed interview responses of 1829 randomly selected participants as part of the Northwestern Juvenile Project, a longitudinal study of health needs and outcomes of youth sampled from a temporary juvenile detention center in a large US city. Youth aged 10 to 18 years were interviewed in detention from November 1995 through June 1998. Participants were reinterviewed up to 13 times over 16 years through February 2015, for a total of 17 776 interviews. The sample was stratified by sex, race/ethnicity, age, and legal status (juvenile or adult court). Data were analyzed from April 2017, when data preparation began, through November 2020.
Exposures:
Firearm involvement during adolescence: use (ie, threaten, shoot), access (ownership, ease of access, firearm in household, membership in gang that carries firearms), and victimization (gunshot injury, threatened with a weapon).
Main outcomes and measures:
Firearm involvement during adulthood: perpetration of firearm violence (ie, threatening with or using a firearm) and firearm ownership.
Results:
Among the 1829 participants, 1388 had a 16-year follow-up interview: 860 males, 528 females; 809 were African American, 203 were non-Hispanic White; 374 were Hispanic; and 2 were other race/ethnicity; median (interquartile range) age of 32 (30-32) years. Eighty-five percent of males and 63.2% of females were involved with firearms as adolescents. Compared with females, males had significantly higher odds of every type of involvement except having a firearm in the home. In adulthood, 41.3% of males and 10.5% of females perpetrated firearm violence. Adolescents who had been threatened with a weapon or injured by firearms had 3.1 (95% CI, 2.0-4.9) and 2.4 (95% CI, 1.2-4.9) times the odds of perpetrating violence during adulthood. Similar associations were found for firearm ownership.
Conclusions and relevance:
Involvement with firearms during adolescence-including victimization-is a significant risk factor for firearm perpetration and ownership during adulthood.
Importance
Violence is a significant public health problem that has become entwined with the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.
Objective
To describe individuals’ concerns regarding violence in the context of the pandemic, experiences of pandemic-related unfair treatment, prevalence of and reasons for firearm acquisition, and changes in firearm storage practices due to the pandemic.
Design, Setting, and Participants
This survey study used data from the 2020 California Safety and Well-being Survey, a probability-based internet survey of California adults conducted from July 14 to 27, 2020. Respondents came from the Ipsos KnowledgePanel, an online research panel with members selected using address-based sampling methods. Responses were weighted to be representative of the adult population of California.
Main Outcomes and Measures
Topics included worry about violence for oneself before and during the pandemic; concern about violence for someone else due to a pandemic-related loss; experiences of unfair treatment attributed to the pandemic; firearm and ammunition acquisition due to the pandemic; and changes in firearm storage practices due to the pandemic.
Results
Of 5018 invited panel members, 2870 completed the survey (completion rate, 57%). Among respondents (52.3% [95% CI, 49.5%-55.0%] women; mean [SD] age, 47.9 [16.9] years; 41.9% [95% CI, 39.3%-44.6%] White individuals), self-reported worry about violence for oneself was significantly higher during the pandemic for all violence types except mass shootings, ranging from a 2.8 percentage point increase for robbery (from 65.5% [95% CI, 62.8%-68.0%] to 68.2% [95% CI, 65.6%-70.7%]; P = .008) to a 5.6 percentage point increase for stray bullet shootings (from 44.5% [95% CI, 41.7%-47.3%] to 50.0% [47.3%-52.8%]; P < .001). The percentage of respondents concerned that someone they know might intentionally harm themselves was 13.1% (95% CI, 11.5%-15.3%). Of those, 7.5% (95% CI, 4.5%-12.2%) said it was because the other person had experienced a pandemic-related loss. An estimated 110 000 individuals (2.4% [95% CI, 1.1%-5.0%] of firearm owners in the state) acquired a firearm due to the pandemic, including 47 000 new owners (43.0% [95% CI, 14.8%-76.6%] of those who had acquired a firearm). Of owners who stored at least 1 firearm in the least secure way, 6.7% (95% CI, 2.7%-15.6%) said they had adopted this unsecure storage practice in response to the pandemic.
Conclusions and Relevance
In this analysis of findings from the 2020 California Safety and Well-being Survey, the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with increases in self-reported worry about violence for oneself and others, increased firearm acquisition, and changes in firearm storage practices. Given the impulsive nature of many types of violence, short-term crisis interventions may be critical for reducing violence-related harm.
Objectives
This study examines the effect of crime‐specific fears (worry about crime and perceived risk of crime), violent victimization, and diffuse anxieties (belief in a dangerous world [BDW], general distrust, and belief in others’ violent intentions) on protective gun ownership and involvement in “active” gun behaviors (i.e., gun accessibility in the home and handgun carrying).
Methods
We use data on over 4,000 U.S. adults from the 2017 nationally representative Pew Research Center's American Trends Panel.
Results
Fear of crime and perceived risks are largely unrelated to gun ownership, yet violent victimization influences protective ownership, which in turn influences gun accessibility. Additionally, diffuse fears and anxieties also matter for protective ownership and accessibility, with some effects explained by political party affiliation. Broader, general distrust of others is associated with owners’ frequency of carrying their handgun outside of the home.
Conclusion
The results highlight the complexity of the fear‐guns link, with multiple dimensions of fear and experience at work.
Firearm carriage is a key risk factor for interpersonal firearm violence, a leading cause of adolescent (age < 18) mortality. However, the epidemiology of adolescent firearm carriage has not been well characterized. This scoping review examined four databases (PubMed; Scopus; EMBASE; Criminal Justice Abstracts) to summarize research on patterns, motives, and underlying risk/protective factors for adolescent firearm carriage. Of 6156 unique titles, 53 peer-reviewed articles met inclusion criteria and were reviewed. These studies mostly examined urban Black youth, finding that adolescents typically carry firearms intermittently throughout adolescence and primarily for self-defense/protection. Seven future research priorities were identified, including: (1) examining adolescent carriage across age, gender, and racial/ethnic subgroups; (2) improving on methodological limitations of prior research, including disaggregating firearm from other weapon carriage and using more rigorous methodology (e.g., random/systematic sampling; broader population samples); (3) conducting longitudinal analyses that establish temporal causality for patterns, motives, and risk/protective factors; (4) capitalizing on m-health to develop more nuanced characterizations of underlying motives; (5) increasing the study of precursors for first-time carriage; (6) examining risk and protective factors beyond the individual-level; and, (7) enhancing the theoretical foundation for firearm carriage within future investigations.
This paper presents an integrated framework for estimation and inference from generalized linear models using adjusted score functions for mean and median bias reduction. General expressions for the mean and median bias-reducing adjusted score functions are derived in terms of quantities that are readily available in standard software for fitting generalized linear models. The adjusted score equations are solved using a quasi-Fisher scoring algorithm that is shown to be equivalent to iteratively re-weighted least squares with appropriately adjusted working variates. Inference about the model parameters, including procedures for model comparison, can be done in a plug-in manner using Wald statistics based on the resulting estimators. We further discuss how reduced-bias estimation of multinomial logistic regression can be achieved within this framework via the corresponding Poisson log-linear model, and present a mixed adjustment strategy when the estimation of a dispersion parameter is necessary that relies on core invariance properties that are desirable when using generalized linear models.
The package icenReg provides classic survival regression models for interval-censored data. We present an update to the package that extends the parametric models into the Bayesian framework. Core additions include functionality to define the regression model with the standard regression syntax while providing a custom prior function. Several other utility functions are presented that allow for simplified examination of the posterior distribution.
Americans are the world’s best armed citizens and public polling suggests protection/self-defense is their main reason for gun ownership. However, there is virtually no psychological research on gun ownership. The present article develops the first psychological process model of defensive gun ownership—specifically, a two-component model that considers both the antecedents and consequences of owning a gun for protection/self-defense. We demonstrate that different levels of threat construal—the specific perceived threat of assault and a diffuse threat of a dangerous world—independently predict handgun ownership; we also show how utility judgments can explain the motivated reasoning that drives beliefs about gun rights. We tested our model in two independent samples of gun owners (total N = 899), from just before and after the Orlando mass shooting. This study illustrates how social-cognitive theories can help explain what motivates Americans to own handguns and advocate for broad rights to carry and use them.
Differences in the reporting units of data from diverse sources and changes in units over time are common obstacles to analysis of areal data. We compare common approaches to this problem in the context of changes over time in the boundaries of U.S. census tracts. In every decennial census, many tracts are split, consolidated, or changed in other ways from the previous boundaries to reflect population growth or decline. We examine two interpolation methods to create a bridge between years, one that relies only on areal weighting and another that also introduces population weights. Results demonstrate that these approaches produce substantially different estimates for variables that involve population counts, but they have a high degree of convergence for variables defined as rates or averages. Finally, the article describes the Longitudinal Tract Database (LTDB), through which we are making available public-use tools to implement these methods to create estimates within 2010 tract boundaries for any tract-level data (from the census or other sources) that are available for prior years as early as 1970.
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
Two waves of longitudinal data from a high-poverty sample of minority youth
living in extreme poverty was used to determine if the nexus (or intersection) of
gang membership T1, exposure to violence T1, and violent behavior T1 is a
precursor of first time gun carrying T2. The findings indicated a significant
amount of overlap between gang membership, exposure to violence, and violent
behavior. The multivariate findings also revealed that: (1) the effect of exposure
to violence T1 on initiation of gun carrying T2 became non-significant after
controlling for gang membership T1 and violent behavior T1; and (2) only 1.8%
of youth were part of the nexus of gang membership T1, exposure to violence
T1, and violent behavior T1, but they were 665% more likely to initiate gun
carrying T2. The theoretical and policy implications of the findings for the
prevention of youth gun violence as well as areas for future research are also
discussed.
Sociologists have given considerable attention to identifying the neighborhood-level social-interactional mechanisms that influence outcomes such as crime, educational attainment, and health. Yet, cultural mechanisms are often overlooked in quantitative studies of neighborhood effects. This paper adds a cultural dimension to neighborhood effects research by exploring the consequences of legal cynicism. Legal cynicism refers to a cultural frame in which people perceive the law as illegitimate, unresponsive, and ill equipped to ensure public safety. The authors find that legal cynicism explains why homicide persisted in certain Chicago neighborhoods during the 1990s despite declines in poverty and declines in violence city-wide.
A dual taxonomy is presented to reconcile 2 incongruous facts about antisocial behavior: (a) It shows impressive continuity over age, but (b) its prevalence changes dramatically over age, increasing almost 10-fold temporarily during adolescence. This article suggests that delinquency conceals 2 distinct categories of individuals, each with a unique natural history and etiology: A small group engages in antisocial behavior of 1 sort or another at every life stage, whereas a larger group is antisocial only during adolescence. According to the theory of life-course-persistent antisocial behavior, children's neuropsychological problems interact cumulatively with their criminogenic environments across development, culminating in a pathological personality. According to the theory of adolescence-limited antisocial behavior, a contemporary maturity gap encourages teens to mimic antisocial behavior in ways that are normative and adjustive.
To estimate the cause-effect relationship between exposure to firearm violence and subsequent perpetration of serious violence, we applied the analytic method of propensity stratification to longitudinal data on adolescents residing in Chicago, Illinois. Results indicate that exposure to firearm violence approximately doubles the probability that an adolescent will perpetrate serious violence over the subsequent 2 years.
Importance
Little is known about support for and willingness to engage in political violence in the United States. Such violence would likely involve firearms.
Objective
To evaluate whether firearm owners’ and nonowners’ support for political violence differs and whether support among owners varies by type of firearms owned, recency of purchase, and frequency of carrying a loaded firearm in public.
Design, Setting, and Participants
This cross-sectional nationally representative survey study was conducted from May 13 to June 2, 2022, among US adult members of the Ipsos KnowledgePanel, including an oversample of firearm owners.
Exposure
Firearm ownership vs nonownership.
Main Outcomes and Measures
Main outcomes concern (1) support for political violence, in general and to advance specific political objectives; (2) personal willingness to engage in political violence, by severity of violence and target population; and (3) perceived likelihood of firearm use in political violence. Outcomes are expressed as weighted proportions and adjusted prevalence differences, with P values adjusted for the false-discovery rate and reported as q values.
Results
The analytic sample comprised 12 851 respondents: 5820 (45.3%) firearm owners, 6132 (47.7%) nonowners without firearms at home, and 899 (7.0%) nonowners with firearms at home. After weighting, 51.0% (95% CI, 49.9%-52.1%) were female, 8.5% (95% CI, 7.5%-9.5%) Hispanic, 9.1% (95% CI, 8.1%-10.2%) non-Hispanic Black, and 62.6% (95% CI, 61.5%-63.8%) non-Hispanic White; the mean (SD) age was 48.5 (18.0) years. Owners were more likely than nonowners without firearms at home to consider violence usually or always justified to advance at least 1 of 17 specific political objectives (owners: 38.8%; 95% CI, 37.3%-40.4%; nonowners: 29.8%; 95% CI, 28.5%-31.2%; adjusted difference, 6.5 percentage points; 95% CI, 4.5-9.3 percentage points; q < .001) but were not more willing to engage in political violence. Recent purchasers, owners who always or nearly always carry loaded firearms in public, and to a lesser extent, owners of assault-type rifles were more supportive of and willing to engage in political violence than other subgroups of firearm owners.
Conclusions and Relevance
In this study of support for political violence in the United States, differences between firearm owners and nonowners without firearms at home were small to moderate when present. Differences were greater among subsets of owners than between owners and nonowners. These findings can guide risk-based prevention efforts.
I trace the evolution of gun culture in the U.S., starting with the prehistorical normality and significance of projectile weaponry among Homo sapiens, then turning to the largely practical use of firearms as tools in the Colonial, Revolutionary, and Early Republic eras (ca. 1607–1850). I highlight the emergence of Gun Culture 1.0, which centered on sport hunting, recreation, and collecting and was the core of American gun culture from approximately 1850 to 2010. I then show the roots of Gun Culture 2.0, which began in the 1960s and 1970s and centered on self-defense. I use various indicators to document that, by 2010, armed self-defense had become the core of American gun culture. In the penultimate section of the article, I use the great gun-buying spree of 2020+ to show the diversity that exists within Gun Culture 2.0, a theme that carries over to the conclusion, where I consider possible future directions of gun culture.
Rationale: While empirical interest in understanding the mental health consequences surrounding gun violence has increased, currently there is much unknown about the long reach of childhood exposure to gun violence on handgun carrying across the life course.
Objective: The current study aims to evaluate the relations between witnessing gun violence before age 12 and subsequent handgun carrying behavior from adolescence to adulthood in a nationally representative sample of U.S. youth.
Methods: Data from 5,695 - 5,875 participants across 15 waves from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 are analyzed. Categorical latent growth curve models are estimated to assess individual differences in handgun carrying behavior over time and the relationships between childhood exposure to gun violence, initial levels during adolescence, and rates of change from adolescence to adulthood.
Results: Participants who reported witnessing seeing someone shot or shot at in childhood demonstrated higher odds of carrying a handgun in adolescence. Exposure to gun violence was not associated with changes in the odds of handgun carrying from adolescence to adulthood after controlling for theoretically relevant covariates.
Conclusions: Childhood exposure to gun violence appears to be a risk factor for handgun carrying in adolescence. However, other behaviors and demographic characteristics account for inter-individual differences in changes in handgun carrying across the life course.
Objectives. To determine the frequency of loaded handgun carrying among US adult handgun owners overall and by state concealed carry law status.
Methods. Using a nationally representative survey of US firearm-owning adults in 2019, we asked handgun owners (n = 2389) about their past-month handgun carrying behavior.
Results. A total of 30.3% (95% confidence interval [CI] = 28.0%, 32.6%) of handgun owners carried handguns monthly, of whom 38.1% (95% CI = 33.6%, 42.7%) did so daily. In permitless carry states, 29.7% (95% CI = 25.9%, 33.9%) of handgun owners carried handguns in the past month, compared with 33.1% (95% CI = 29.9%, 36.3%) in shall issue states and 19.7% (95% CI = 14.9%, 25.5%) in may issue states. Of handgun owners without a permit, 7.5% (95% CI = 4.1%, 13.3%) of those in may issue states and 11.5% (95% CI = 8.5%, 15.4%) of those in shall issues states carried handguns in the past month.
Conclusions. In 2019, about 16 million US adult handgun owners carried handguns in the past month (up from 9 million in 2015), and approximately 6 million did so daily (twice the 3 million who did so in 2015). Proportionally fewer handgun owners carried handguns in states where issuing authorities had substantial discretion in granting permits. (Am J Public Health. 2022;112(12):1783–1790. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2022.307094 )
The U.S. faces rapidly rising rates of violent crime committed with firearms. This study sought to estimate the impact of changes to laws that regulate the concealed carrying of weapons (CCW laws) on violent crimes committed with a firearm. We used augmented synthetic control models and random-effect, meta-analyses to estimate the state-specific effects and the average effect of adopting Shall-Issue CCW permitting laws on rates of homicides involving a gun, homicides by other means, aggravated assaults with a gun and with a knife, and robberies with a gun and with a knife. The average effects were stratified by the presence or absence of several Shall-Issue permit provisions. Shall-Issue CCW law adoption was associated with a 9.5% increase in rates of assaults with firearms during the first 10-years post-law adoption and associated with an 8.8% increase in rates of homicides by other means. When Shall-Issue laws allowed violent misdemeanants to acquire CCW permits, the laws were associated with higher rates of gun assaults. Adopting a Shall-Issue CCW law has likely increased non-fatal violent crime committed with firearms. Harmful effects of Shall-Issue laws are most clear when provisions intended to reduce risks associated with civilian gun carrying are absent.
The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) represents a data treasure for developmental psychologists working in both adolescent and life-span development. Add Health is a nationally representative sample of more than 20,000 adolescents in grades 7–12 in 1994–1995, who were followed for 25 years into early midlife over five interview waves. The innovative multilevel design collected direct measures of the social contexts of adolescent life and tracked developmental outcomes in health, health behaviors, cognition, achievement, and relationships over time. Biological data appropriate to the developmental stages of the cohort and relevant biosocial processes were integrated into the longitudinal waves of data collection. This review describes Add Health's design and data contents and highlights illustrative Add Health articles that examine developmental processes and outcomes in the areas of mental health, health behavior, cognition, and relationships. We conclude with new opportunities for developmental analyses and suggest future areas of research.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, Volume 4 is December 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Background:
The surge in background checks beginning in March 2020 suggested an acceleration in firearm purchases. Little was known about the people who bought these guns.
Objective:
To estimate the number and describe characteristics of firearm purchasers over a period spanning prepandemic and pandemic time, characterize new gun owners, and estimate the number of persons newly exposed to household firearms.
Design:
Probability-based online survey conducted in April 2021. Survey weights generated nationally representative estimates.
Setting:
United States, 1 January 2019 to 26 April 2021.
Participants:
19 049 of 29 985 (64%) English-speaking adults responded to the survey invitation; 5932 owned firearms, including 1933 who had purchased firearms since 2019, of whom 447 had become new gun owners.
Measurements:
The estimated number and characteristics of adults who, since 2019, have purchased firearms, distinguishing those who became new gun owners from those who did not, and the estimated number of household members newly exposed to firearms.
Results:
An estimated 2.9% of U.S. adults (7.5 million) became new gun owners from 1 January 2019 to 26 April 2021. Most (5.4 million) had lived in homes without guns, collectively exposing, in addition to themselves, over 11 million persons to household firearms, including more than 5 million children. Approximately half of all new gun owners were female (50% in 2019 and 47% in 2020 to 2021), 20% were Black (21% in 2019 and in 2020-2021), and 20% were Hispanic (20% in 2019 and 19% in 2020-2021). By contrast, other recent purchasers who were not new gun owners were predominantly male (70%) and White (74%), as were gun owners overall (63% male, 73% White).
Limitations:
Retrospective assessment of when respondents purchased firearms. National estimates about new gun owners were based on 447 respondents.
Conclusion:
Efforts to reduce firearm injury should consider the recent acceleration in firearm purchasing and the characteristics of new gun owners.
Primary funding source:
The Joyce Foundation.
Existing scholarship usually presents people’s attitudes about guns as fixed and fully formed. Rarely are such attitudes examined as the outcome of social processes. As a result, while we know a great deal about what people think about guns, we know very little about the development of these beliefs. In this paper, we use a combination of surveys and life history interviews with a national sample of college students between the ages of 18 and 24 to examine how attitudes about guns develop in childhood and young adulthood. We find that while family gun ownership matters, positive attitudes about guns develop through active socialization that continues beyond childhood and is not reducible to family background. Relationships play a key role in this process, with changes in relationships often driving changes in attitudes about guns. Changes in attitudes about guns can take place in terms of both the content (what young adults think about guns) and the form (how young adults think about guns). In the transition to young adulthood, attitudes about guns develop from being articulated primarily as personal experiences connected to the activity of shooting guns or experiencing gun violence, to being articulated as political beliefs, connected to issues of regulation. These findings contribute to our understanding of gun attitudes by offering insights on not only what people think about guns but also how people come to think about guns in the ways that they do.
Does social protest following the police killing of unarmed Black civilians have a widespread “opinion-mobilizing” effect against the police? Or, does the racialized nature of these events polarize mass opinion based on standing racial and political orientations? To answer these questions, we use a large dataset comprised of weekly cross sections of the American public and employ a regression discontinuity in time (RDiT) approach leveraging the random timing of the police killing of George Floyd and ensuing nationwide protests. We find that the Floyd protests swiftly decreased favorability toward the police and increased perceived anti-Black discrimination among low-prejudice and politically liberal Americans. However, attitudes among high-prejudice and politically conservative Americans either remained unchanged or evinced only small and ephemeral shifts. Our evidence suggests that the Floyd protests served to further racialize and politicize attitudes within the domain of race and law enforcement in the U.S.
This article advances and tests hypotheses on arrest in the lives of 1,057 individuals from an original longitudinal study of multiple birth cohorts who came of age during a period of considerable social change in the last quarter-century. The authors show that large cohort differences in the course of arrest arise from changing macrohistorical environments rather than dispositional, demographic, socioeconomic, or neighborhood differences in childhood. Further, the impact of two leading explanations of crime—socioeconomic disadvantage and low self-control—depends on the historical timing of when children reach late adolescence and early adulthood. Cohort fortunes diverge mainly as a result of when both crime rates and police enforcement—especially for drug offenses—unexpectedly fell. The results quantify the power of social change and contribute a new understanding of inter-and intracohort inequalities in growing up during the era of mass incarceration and the great American crime decline.
Background
The cumulative, negative health effects of alcohol consumption are exacerbated in older adulthood. We used a ‘life course epidemiology’ approach to explore how alcohol use trajectories develop across the lifespan, what early life events influence these trajectories and their associations with late-life health.
Methods
Survey data combined with retrospective life course history interviews were collected from 749 non-lifetime alcohol abstainer adults aged 61–81 years (51 % female).
Frequency and quantity items of the AUDIT-C assessed alcohol use across each decade of life. Early life factors were childhood socioeconomic status, parental health behaviours, and age of drinking onset. Health outcomes were alcohol-related conditions.
Results
Latent class growth analysis yielded two life course trajectories for women: consistently infrequent, low quantity drinking (Group 1: 48 %) and increasingly frequent, low quantity drinking (Group 2: 52 %). Men showed three trajectories: consistently infrequent, low quantity drinking (Group 3: 36 %); increasingly frequent, low quantity drinking (Group 4: 51 %); and drinking with increasing frequency and quantity until midlife, after which consumption gradually declined (Group 5: 13 %). Better childhood socioeconomic status was associated with Groups 2 and 4. Later drinking onset was associated with Groups 1 and 3. Parental alcohol misuse, early drinking initiation and childhood socioeconomic adversity were predictive of Group 5. Those in Group 5 were five-to-seven times more likely to have alcohol-related comorbidities.
Conclusions
Early life experiences influence life course hazardous alcohol use. Interventions across the life course, from childhood, when drinking may be initiated, through to older adulthood, when sensitivity to alcohol increases, are needed.
Male antisocial behaviour is concentrated in the adolescent period of the life course, as documented by the curve of crime over age. This article reviews recent evidence regarding the hypothesis that the age–crime curve conceals two groups with different causes. Life-course-persistent males show extreme, pervasive, persistent antisocial behaviour from early childhood to adulthood. They are hypothesized to be rare, with pathological risk factors and poor life outcomes. In contrast, adolescence-limited males show similar levels of antisocial behaviour but primarily during the adolescent stage of development. They are hypothesized to be common and normative, whereas abstainers from offending are rare. This Review recaps the 25-year history of the developmental taxonomy of antisocial behaviour, concluding that it is standing the test of time in research, and making an impact on policy in early-years prevention and juvenile justice. Research is needed into how the taxonomy relates to neuroscience, health, genetics and changes in modern crime, including digital crime.
Objective
Although studies have found that youth exposed to violence are more likely to carry guns than non-exposed youth, this association could be due to common causal factors or other pre-existing differences between individuals. In this study, within-individual change models were used to determine whether juvenile offenders exhibit an increased propensity to carry a firearm after being exposed to gun violence and/or non-gun violence. The advantage of this approach is all time-invariant factors are eliminated as potential confounders.
Method
1170 racially/ethnically diverse male juvenile offenders were recruited in Arizona and Pennsylvania (ages 14-19 at recruitment). Participants were interviewed every six months for three years followed by four annual assessments. The outcome was gun carrying and the primary predictors were exposure to gun violence and non-gun violence. Time-varying covariates included exposure to peers who carried guns, exposure to peers who engaged in other (non-gun) criminal acts, developmental changes in gun carrying, and changes in gun carrying due to incarceration/institutionalization.
Results
Adolescent offenders were significantly more likely to carry a gun in recall periods following exposure to gun violence, but not after exposure to non-gun violence. Effect of gun violence on carrying was significant throughout adolescence and young adulthood, and could not be accounted for by time-varying and time-invariant confounders.
Conclusions
Interventions to reduce illegal gun carrying should target young men in medical and mental health settings who experience or witness gun violence, as well as those living in communities with high rates of gun violence.
Recent waves of legislation have made it much easier for gun owners to obtain a Concealed Handgun License (CHL) and thereby carry their guns in public except when explicitly prohibited. Because data are difficult to access, our understanding of who seeks and obtains such licenses remains limited. Using data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, this article fills this empirical gap by describing demographic trends and characteristics of applicants for CHLs in five states: Florida, Indiana, Massachusetts, Texas, and Utah. The results establish that (1) applications for CHLs are growing at fast rates; (2) there are significant gender and racial disparities in terms of who applies for CHLs, with men 2.9 to 5.5 times more likely to apply than women, and whites 1.3 to 2.0 times more likely to apply than blacks; (3) in Florida and Utah, these demographic gaps have widened over time; and (4) there are significant racial disparities in terms of application outcomes, with black applicants being 3.3 to 5.5 times more likely to be denied a license than white applicants. Moreover, we do not find the patterns in Massachusetts, a may-issue state, to be significantly different from the shall-issue states in our sample.
Although the rate of gun ownership in U.S. households has declined from an estimated 50 percent in 1970 to approximately 32 percent today, Americans’ propensity for carrying concealed firearms has risen sharply in recent years. Today, more than 11 million Americans hold concealed handgun licenses, an increase from 4.5 million in 2007. Yet, despite increasing numbers of firearms and expanding opportunities for gun owners to carry concealed firearms in public places, we know little about the reasons for obtaining a concealed carry permit or what a publicly armed citizenry means for society. Angela Stroud draws on in-depth interviews with permit holders and on field observations at licensing courses to understand how social and cultural factors shape the practice of obtaining a permit to carry a concealed firearm. Stroud’s subjects usually first insist that a gun is simply a tool for protection, but she shows how much more the license represents: possessing a concealed firearm is a practice shaped by race, class, gender, and cultural definitions that separate “good guys” from those who represent threats. Stroud’s work goes beyond the existing literature on guns in American culture, most of which concentrates on the effects of the gun lobby on public policy and perception. Focusing on how respondents view the world around them, this book demonstrates that the value gun owners place on their firearms is an expression of their sense of self and how they see their social environment.
Using monthly data constructed from futures markets on presidential election outcomes and a novel proxy for firearm purchases, this paper analyzes the reponse of the demand for guns to the likelihood of Barack Obama being elected in 2008. Point estimate suggests the existence of a large Obama effect on the demand for guns. This political effect is larger than the effect associated with the worsening economic conditions. This paper presents robust empirical evidence supporting the hypothesis that the unprecedented increase in the demand for guns was partially driven by fears of a future Obama gun-control policy. Conversely, the evidence for a racial prejudice motivation is less conclusive. Furthermore, this paper argues that the Obama effect did not represent a short-lived intertemporal substitution effect, and that it permanently affected the stock of guns in circulation. Finally, states that had the largest increases in the demand for guns during the 2008 election race experienced significant changes in certain categories of crime relative to other states following Obama s election. In particular, those states were 20 percent more likely to experience a shooting event where at least three people were killed.
In what sense does American pro-gun sentiment constitute a ‘politics’? I use in-depth interviews with 60 male gun carriers
to propose that pro-gun politics not only involve claims to the state, but also centre on particular understandings about the proper role of the state, particularly public law enforcement. I argue that, within the contemporary US context of neo-liberalism
(particularly the War on Crime), guns are a complex response to police failure amid anxieties regarding crime and insecurity.
Specifically, guns serve as political tools used to critique the state’s power to police. Most of the time, gun advocates
articulate guns as a response to the police’s inability to protect citizens; however, they sometimes also describe guns as a response to the police’s propensity to violate. I identify two sets of pro-gun, police-suspicious beliefs that emerge along racialized, masculine lines, which I denote
‘neo-liberal gun politics’ and ‘neo-radical gun politics’. I explain these political beliefs as responses to the state’s power
to police by showing how neo-liberal ideology alongside the War on Crime has shaped American perceptions of public law enforcement.
We advance here a neighborhood-level perspective on racial differences in legal cynicism, dissatisfaction with police, and the tolerance of various forms of deviance. Our basic premise is that structural characteristics of neighbor-hoods explain variations in normative orientations about law, criminal justice, and deviance that are often confounded with the demographic characteristics of individuals. Using a multilevel approach that permits the decomposition of variance within and between neighborhoods, we tested hypotheses on a recently completed study of 8,782 residents of 343 neighborhoods in Chicago. Contrary to received wisdom, we find that African Americans and Latinos are less tolerant of deviance--including violence--than whites. At the same time, neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage display elevated levels of legal cynicism, dissatisfaction with police, and tolerance of deviance unaccounted for by sociodemographic composition and crime-rate differences. Concentrated disadvantage also helps explain why African Americans are more cynical about law and dissatisfied with the police. Neighborhood context is thus important for resolving the seeming paradox that estrangement from legal norms and agencies of criminal justice, especially by blacks, is compatible with the personal condemnation of deviance.
This explanation of crime and deviance over the life course is based on the re-analysis of a classic set of data: Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck's mid-century study of 500 delinquents and 500 non-delinquents from childhood to adulthood. More than five years ago, Robert Sampson and John Laub dusted off 60 cartons of the Gluecks' data that had been stored in the basement of the Harvard Law School and undertook a lengthy process of recoding, computerizing, and reanalyzing it. On the basis of their findings, Sampson and Laub developed a theory of informal social control over the life course which integrates three ideas. First, social bonds to family and school inhibit delinquency in childhood and adolescence. Second, there is continuity in antisocial and deviant behaviour from childhood through adulthood across various dimensions, such as crime, alcohol abuse, divorce and unemployment. And finally, despite these continuities, attachment to the labour force and cohesive marriage sharply mitigate criminal activities. Sampson and Laub thus acknowledge the importance of childhood behaviours and individual differences, but reject the implication that adult social factors have little relevance. They seek to account for both stability and change in crime and deviance throughout the life course. "Crime in the making" challenges several major ideas found in contemporary theory and aims to provide an important new foundation for rethinking criminal justice policy.
S ummary
This paper is concerned with the non‐parametric estimation of a distribution function F , when the data are incomplete due to grouping, censoring and/or truncation. Using the idea of self‐consistency, a simple algorithm is constructed and shown to converge monotonically to yield a maximum likelihood estimate of F. An application to hypothesis testing is indicated.
This paper uses data from an ongoing panel study of urban youth to examine the causes and correlates of hidden gun carrying among young urban males. The analysis assesses the changing impact of gang membership, drug sales, and peer gun ownership for protection on gun carrying at nine separate points over the early adolescent to young adult life course. In early adolescence, gang membership is a strong motivation for gun carrying. At somewhat older ages, drug dealing, particularly high drug sales, and illegal peer gun ownership replace gang membership as the primary determinants of illegal gun carrying.
Previous studies of concealed firearm carrying among children and adolescents have focused on individual risk factors.
To identify features of neighborhoods associated with concealed firearm carrying among a representative sample of youth from Chicago, Ill.
Cross-sectional analysis of individual- and neighborhood-level data collected by the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods.
Families and neighborhoods in Chicago.
Population-based sample of 1842 multiethnic youth aged 9 to 19 years and the 218 neighborhoods in which they resided. Main Outcome Measure Whether youth had ever carried a concealed firearm.
Lifetime estimates for concealed firearm carrying were 4.9% for males and 1.1% for females. We found that youth in safer and less disordered neighborhoods were less likely than youth in unsafe and more disordered neighborhoods to carry concealed firearms. Specifically, multilevel nonlinear regression models identified a positive association between concealed firearm carrying and (1) community members' ratings of neighborhoods as unsafe for children; (2) neighborhood social disorder; and (3) neighborhood physical disorder. Neighborhood collective efficacy was negatively associated with concealed firearm carrying. Models controlled for neighborhood economic indicators and individual and family factors associated with the carrying of concealed firearms by youth.
Youth are less likely to carry concealed firearms in areas where there is less violence and increased safety. Interventions to improve neighborhood conditions such as increasing safety, improving collective efficacy, and reducing social and physical disorder may be efficacious in preventing firearm use and its associated injuries and death among youth.
We propose a non-parametric multiple imputation scheme, NPMLE imputation, for the analysis of interval censored survival data. Features of the method are that it converts interval-censored data problems to complete data or right censored data problems to which many standard approaches can be used, and that measures of uncertainty are easily obtained. In addition to the event time of primary interest, there are frequently other auxiliary variables that are associated with the event time. For the goal of estimating the marginal survival distribution, these auxiliary variables may provide some additional information about the event time for the interval censored observations. We extend the imputation methods to incorporate information from auxiliary variables with potentially complex structures. To conduct the imputation, we use a working failure-time proportional hazards model to define an imputing risk set for each censored observation. The imputation schemes consist of using the data in the imputing risk sets to create an exact event time for each interval censored observation. In simulation studies we show that the use of multiple imputation methods can improve the efficiency of estimators and reduce the effect of missing visits when compared to simpler approaches. We apply the approach to cytomegalovirus shedding data from an AIDS clinical trial, in which CD4 count is the auxiliary variable.
Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program data: Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR) 1976-2021 version v12 (Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research
- J. Kaplan Jacob Kaplan