Restrictive Gun Control Policies Lower Youth Gun Carrying.

A more restrictive gun law environment was associated with a reduced likelihood of youths carrying guns, according to a new study led by a School of Public Health researcher.

In a study published online by JAMA Pediatrics, Ziming Xuan, first author and assistant professor of community health sciences at SPH, and co-author David Hemenway of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health used gun law scores from the Brady Center for each state, with greater values representing a more restrictive gun control environment. They report that a 10-point increase in a gun law score was associated with 9 percent lower odds of youth gun carrying.

Higher adult gun ownership levels also were associated with a higher prevalence of youth carrying guns.

“Gun violence poses a substantial public health threat to adolescents in the United States. Existing evidence points to the need for policies to reduce gun carrying among youth,” they wrote. “We find that the strength of gun policies, including both adult-focused and youth-focused policies, is inversely associated with youth gun carrying.”

An average of 15,000 teenagers, 12 to 19 years old, died annually in the United States from 1999 to 2013. The three leading causes of death among teenagers were unintentional injuries, homicide, and suicide. Among these fatal youth injuries, most homicides were gun-related (83 percent), and about half of suicides involved a gun (45 percent).

Xuan and Hemenway examined the gun law environment and youth gun carrying in the US, as well as whether it was mediated by adult gun ownership. The limited impact of youth-focused gun laws may be explained by the wide prevalence of gun ownership, the authors said. The study of the state gun law environment is relatively limited, they added.

The authors analyzed data from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which includes representative data from students in grades 9 to 12 from 2007, 2009, and 2011. Youth gun carrying was defined as having carried a gun on at least one day during the 30 days before the survey.

The authors found substantial variation in the state-level gun law scores assigned, with average scores across 2007, 2009, and 2011 ranging from a low of 1.3 in Utah to a high of 79.7 in California. Adult gun ownership, as measured by the ratio of suicides committed with a gun to all suicides, ranged from 20 percent in Massachusetts to 70.9 percent in Mississippi.

In 38 states with data on youth gun carrying, the average aggregate prevalence was 6.7 percent, ranging from 1.4 percent in New Jersey to 11 percent in Wyoming.

The authors said their findings “are relevant to gun policy debates about the critical importance of comprehensive state-level gun law environments to prevent youth gun carrying.”

—Lisa Chedekel