Does gun prevalence affect teen gun carrying after all

Previous research suggests that American adolescents usually have ready access to guns, and that the extent of misuse of guns by adolescents is not much affected by local gun prevalence or regulation. This “futility” claim is based on one interpretation of survey data from several cities, but has not been tested directly. Here we do so using microdata from a nationally representative survey, the 1995 National Survey of Adolescent Males. Using the restricted geo-coded version of these data, and conditioning on an extensive set of covariates, we find (among other results) that the likelihood of gun carrying increases markedly with the prevalence of gun ownership in the given community. We also analyze the propensity to carry other types of weapons, finding that it is unrelated to the local prevalence of gun ownership. The prevalence of youths carrying both guns and other weapons is positively related to the local rate of youth violence (as measured by the robbery rate), confirmatory evidence that weapons carrying by youths is motivated in part by self-protection.

[1]  Susan E. Mayer.  What Money Can't Buy: Family Income and Children's Life Chances , 1997 .

[2]  Janet L. Lauritsen,et al.  Neighborhood Disadvantage and the Nature of Violence , 2003 .

[3]  James B. Jacobs,et al.  Keeping Guns out of the Wrong Hands: The Brady Law and the Limits of Regulation , 1995 .

[4]  Steven F. Messner,et al.  To kill or not to kill? Lethal outcomes in injurious attacks , 1996 .

[5]  C. Turner,et al.  Changes in sexual behavior and condom use among teenaged males: 1988 to 1995. , 1998, American journal of public health.

[6]  Philip J. Cook,et al.  Regulating Gun Markets , 1995 .

[7]  Michael J. Moore,et al.  The Effects of Short-Term Variation in Abortion Funding on Pregnancy Outcomes , 1996, Journal of health economics.

[8]  P. J. Huber.  The behavior of maximum likelihood estimates under nonstandard conditions , 1967 .

[9]  Steven D. Levitt.  Juvenile Crime and Punishment , 1997 .

[10]  James D. Wright,et al.  Armed and considered dangerous , 1986 .

[11]  G. Kleck,et al.  The Effects of Weaponry on Human Violence , 1991 .

[12]  W. Evans,et al.  Teens and Traffic Safety , 2001 .

[13]  James D. Wright.  Ten essential observations on guns in America , 1995 .

[14]  Philip J. Cook,et al.  Evaluating gun policy : effects on crime and violence , 2003 .

[15]  Philip J. Cook,et al.  The Technology of Personal Violence , 1991, Crime and Justice.

[16]  A. Piehl,et al.  Problem-Oriented Policing, Deterrence, and Youth Violence: An Evaluation of Boston's Operation Ceasefire , 2001 .

[17]  Daniel D. Polsby,et al.  The False Promise of Gun Control , 1994 .

[18]  Alfred Blumstein,et al.  Youth Violence, Guns, and the Illicit-Drug Industry , 1995 .

[19]  Philip J. Cook,et al.  Environment and Persistence in Youthful Drinking Patterns , 2001 .

[20]  H. White.  Maximum Likelihood Estimation of Misspecified Models , 1982 .

[21]  H. White.  A Heteroskedasticity-Consistent Covariance Matrix Estimator and a Direct Test for Heteroskedasticity , 1980 .

[22]  Jonathan Zinman,et al.  Youth Smoking in the United States: Evidence and Implications , 2001 .

[23]  P. Wilcox.  Self-Help? Examining the Anti-Crime Effectiveness of Citizen Weapon Possession , 2002 .

[24]  Alfred Blumstein,et al.  The Crime Drop in America: Disaggregating the Violence Trends , 2005 .

[25]  Risky Behavior Among Youths: An Economic Analysis , 2001 .

[26]  F. Zimring,et al.  Is gun control likely to reduce violent killings? University of Chicago Law Review 35 , 1968 .

[27]  William Wells,et al.  WEAPON EFFECTS AND INDIVIDUAL INTENT TO DO HARM: INFLUENCES ON THE ESCALATION OF VIOLENCE , 2002 .

[28]  Jim Leitzel,et al.  “Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy”: An Economic Analysis of the Attack on Gun Control , 1996 .

[29]  H. L. Le Roy,et al.  Proceedings of the Fifth Berkeley Symposium on Mathematical Statistics and Probability; Vol. IV , 1969 .