Juvenile Crime and Victimization - Guns And Violence

Schools, neighborhoods, and even private homes can be dangerous places for children and adolescents. Knives, handguns, and shotguns turn up in searches of school lockers. News reports describe incidents of children being shot on playgrounds or of youths firing rifles as they cruise the streets in cars. M. H. Swahn et al., in "Prevalence of Youth Access to Alcohol or a Gun in the Home" (Injury Prevention, 2002), found that nearly one-quarter (24.3%) of adolescents ages twelve to eighteen have easy access to a gun in their homes.

From 1983 to 1994 gun homicides by juveniles tripled, while homicides involving other types of weapons decreased. (See Figure 8.9.) Between 1994 and 1997, however, gun homicides by young people declined sharply, back to approximately 1989 levels.

FIGURE 8.9

Young Homicide Victims

In 2002, 1,357 youths under age eighteen were murdered—9.7% of all homicides that year. (See Table 8.5.) A slightly higher percentage of young victims were white (50.8%) than African-American (45%). Almost two-thirds of the young victims (63.9%) were male and one-third (36%) were female. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Injury Fact Book 2001–2002), in 1998 82% of homicide victims under age eighteen were killed with guns.

Firearm Deaths among Children and Youth

The teen death rate for firearm-related injuries more than doubled between 1970 and 1995 before beginning to decline. During those peak years, the overwhelming majority of deaths among young African-American males were firearm-associated, and American teenage boys were more likely to die from gunshot wounds than from all natural causes combined. In 2001 more than one out of every five deaths among all fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds and half of all deaths among African-American males fifteen to twenty-four were caused by firearms.

Carrying a Weapon

The 2003 Youth Risk Behavior Survey reported that 17.1% of all students in grades nine through twelve claimed to have carried a weapon at least once within the previous thirty days, and 6.1% had carried a gun. (See Table 8.6.) Males were significantly more likely to carry a

TABLE 8.5

Murder victims age 24 and under, by age, sex, and race, 2002
		Sex			Race
Age	Total	Male	Female	Unknown	White	Black	Other	Unknown
1Because of rounding, the percentages may not add to 100.0.
2Does not include unknown ages.
SOURCE: Adapted from "Table 2.5. Murder Victims by Age, Sex and Race, 2002," in Crime in the United States 2002, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2003, http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_02/pdf/2sectiontwo.pdf (accessed September 16, 2004)
Total	14,054	10,779	3,251	24	6,757	6,730	377	190
Percent distribution1	100.0	76.7	23.1	0.2	48.1	47.9	2.7	1.4
Under 182	1,357	867	489	1	689	610	45	13
Under 222	3,398	2,624	772	2	1,581	1,683	104	30
18 and over2	12,406	9,703	2,699	4	5,945	6,009	331	121
Infant (under 1)	180	96	84	0	102	71	4	3
1 to 4	328	180	147	1	176	134	14	4
5 to 8	86	35	51	0	50	33	3	0
9 to 12	92	50	42	0	53	35	4	0
13 to 16	390	281	109	0	180	196	11	3
17 to 19	1,184	1,018	166	0	519	615	39	11
20 to 24	2,756	2,356	398	2	1,115	1,560	58	23

weapon (26.9%) than females (6.7%), and males were even more likely than females to carry a gun (10.2% and 1.6%, respectively). Non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic African-American, and Hispanic students were equally likely to carry a weapon.

Tracing "Crime Guns"

Rising rates of violent crime involving the use of firearms in the late 1980s and early 1990s led the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) to initiate the Youth Crime Gun Interdiction Initiative in 1996. In 2000 law enforcement agencies in the forty-four large cities that participated in the program submitted 88,570 trace requests on "crime guns" to the ATF's National Tracing Center. Firearms were traced to the point of original sale as one component of the national effort to reduce youth violence involving firearms.

In 2002 the ATF announced the results of these year-2000 traces (Crime Gun Trace Reports 2000 National Report, July 2002). More than 18,000 crime guns (20%) had been confiscated from youths ages eighteen to twenty-four, the peak years of age for being a crime gun possessor. Juveniles made up 8% of crime gun possessors (4,112 guns). Six of every ten handguns confiscated from youths and juveniles were semiautomatic pistols, slightly higher than the five of every ten confiscated from adults. Most of the crime guns had been obtained from firearm traffickers, who illegally sell new, used, or stolen weapons. The serial numbers had been obliterated from most of the traced guns, indicating that someone in the chain of possession assumed that the gun would be used for a crime. The ATF investigation revealed that nearly a third of the crime guns had entered the retail market between December 1996 and December 1997. This short "time to crime" indicated the ease with which a criminal could "fence" (sell a stolen item to a third party) a gun and the pervasiveness of the illegal firearms market.

Weapons Offenses

Weapons offenses are violations of local, state, and/or federal statutes or regulations that control deadly weapons. Deadly weapons include firearms and their ammunition, silencers, explosives, and certain knives. Between 1985 and 1993 the juvenile arrest rate for weapon offenses more than doubled, from about ninety per one hundred thousand juveniles to about 225 per one hundred thousand. After the peak in 1993, however, the rate of arrests declined sharply to about 1985 levels by 2000. (See Figure 8.10.)

Teenage males arrested for weapons offenses in 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2001 far outnumbered females arrested. (See Table 8.2 and Table 8.3.) However, between 1980 and 2001 the arrest rate for weapons offenses increased two-and-a-half times for females age ten to seventeen, from 10.6 to 25.4 arrests per one hundred thousand; at the same time the rate for males only increased from 169.8 to 197.7 arrests per one hundred thousand. (See Table 8.7.) In 1980 the rate for males was sixteen times that for females; in 2000 the rate for males was not quite eight times that for females.

Survey Results: Teens and Violence

The largest survey of teens ever undertaken in the United States, "Protecting Adolescents from Harm: Findings from the National Longitudinal Study on Adolescent Health" (Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 278, no. 10, September 1997), was conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the University of Minnesota. The researchers questioned 90,000 students in grades seven through

TABLE 8.6

Percentage of high school students who carried a weapon1 or a gun2, by sex, race, ethnicity, and grade, 2003
	Carried a weapon			Carried a gun
Category	Female %	Male %	Total %	Female %	Male %	Total %
1For example, a gun, knife, or club on ≥ 1 of the 30 days preceding the survey.
2On ≥ 1 of the 30 days preceding the survey.
3Non-Hispanic.
SOURCE: "Table 6. Percentage of High School Students Who Carried a Weapon or a Gun, by Sex, Race/Ethnicity, and Grade," in "Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance—United States, 2003," Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Surveillance Summaries: Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, vol. 53, no. SS–02, May 21, 2004, http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/PDF/SS/SS5302.pdf (accessed September 16, 2004)
Race/ethnicity
White3	5.5	27.1	16.7	1.5	10.0	5.9
Black3	9.8	24.9	17.3	1.4	10.6	6.0
Hispanic	8.5	24.3	16.5	2.6	8.2	5.4
Grade
9	8.8	26.6	18.0	2.1	9.3	5.8
10	5.2	26.5	15.9	1.4	10.4	5.9
11	6.8	29.2	15.2	1.6	10.0	6.3
12	5.2	25.2	15.5	1.0	10.0	5.7
Total	6.7	26.9	17.1	1.6	10.2	6.1

twelve at 145 schools around the country. They found that almost one-fourth of students surveyed had easy access to guns at home. Adolescents living in homes where guns were kept were more likely to behave violently and more likely to contemplate or attempt suicide.

Teens who said they had strong family ties were less likely to be involved in interpersonal violence than those who said they did not have close family ties. Older teens (ninth through twelfth grades) who had a parent present at breakfast, after school, at dinner, and at bedtime were also less likely to behave violently.

More than 10% of males and 5% of females interviewed said they had committed a violent act in the previous year. These acts included participating in fights, injuring someone, threatening someone with a weapon, using a weapon in a fight, or shooting or stabbing someone.

Younger teens (seventh and eighth graders) more often reported having been involved in violent activities than older teens. Urban teens, teens whose families received welfare, and Native American teens seemed more likely than others to have been involved in violence. About one in eight students said that they had brought a weapon to school in the month prior to being surveyed.