Weapons in the Hands of Teenagers

The United States has more guns than it has people. There are 121 guns for every 100 citizens, according to the most recent Small Arms Survey by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies. This makes the U.S. by far the most heavily armed country on the globe. By contrast, Japan has less than one firearm per 100 people. Of the 857 million known firearms in the world, U.S. citizens own 393 million, more than the other top 25 countries combined.

Unfortunately, many of those guns are finding their way into the hands of teens. A growing problem in America is weapons in the hands of young people. A survey published in the journal Pediatrics in 2022 found that the number of teens carrying guns had risen by 41 percent since 2002. A 2015 survey by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealed that more than 16 percent of high school students reported carrying a gun, knife, or other weapon at least once in the past month, including more than 5 percent who carried a gun.

For the survey, the CDC defined a weapon as a knife, club, or gun. But almost anything can be used as a weapon, even if it was not made for that purpose: bricks, bottles, baseball bats, box cutters, or someone’s hands or feet. Still, it’s items such as switchblades, “Oriental fighting sticks,” and guns—all of which are designed to be used against another person or living thing—that cause the most damage.

In 1999, the Violence Policy Center predicted that firearm-related deaths would surpass automobile accidents as the leading cause of death among young Americans in the first decade of the twenty-first century. They were proven correct, but it took until 2020 for gun-related deaths to become the number one killer of people under nineteen. Annually, more than 3,500 children and teens are shot and killed, and 15,000 are shot and wounded—an average of 52 American children and teens every day.

Violence among teens is a major concern to law enforcement officials, parents, and teens themselves. The many groups that promote the awareness of violence are evidence of this. The groups include the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence and the National School Safety Center. The goal of such organizations is to make people aware of the continuing problem of weapons violence, while finding ways to prevent it.

An Epidemic of Violence

In May 2022, an eighteen-year-old entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and killed nineteen students and two teachers before police finally shot him. It followed a pattern set in 1999, when two teen boys opened fire at Columbine High School in Colorado, killing fifteen. Along with the killing of seventeen people at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, these are the three worst school shootings committed by teens.

In 2020, 45,222 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S., according to the CDC—the most on record. Gun-related deaths declined only slightly in 2021 to 45,037. In 2021, there were 692 mass shootings, nearly two a day in the United States. Increasingly, mass shootings are committed by young people. According to the New York Times, six of the nine deadliest mass shootings in the United States between 2018 and 2022 were committed by people who were twenty-one or younger. According to Mark Rosenberg of the CDC, teen violence has become an epidemic. “I don’t think any country not at war has ever had to deal with this problem,” he said. “New forms of youth violence, like an infectious disease, keep emerging.”

According to the Pew Research Center, 72 percent of Americans see gun violence as a big problem. You may be asking yourself: Why hasn’t society banded together to stop the problem? To understand, you need to look more closely at the special place weapons, especially guns, have in American society.

Access to Weapons

We live in a world of weapons. You don’t need to look very far to see how widespread and accepted they are. Start by turning on a television. Incidents involving weapons are sure to be on the news. Many times these stories are discussed even before important world events. The next time you walk through a toy store, head for the “Action Toys” department. You’ll probably find an assortment of toy guns and rifles, bows and arrows, plastic swords, knives, grenades, and space weapons.

There’s nothing new about any of this, but the glorification of gun violence is not timeless in America. While weapons have always been an important part of American life, their celebration begins in earnest with the rise of “the Western” in both movies and novels. Anyone who has ever seen a cowboy movie knows something about the Wild West. Only partially based in reality, the Wild West is portrayed as a place where white American males have a six-shooter hanging from their belts or a rifle in their saddlebags. Western books and movies emphasized white American men seizing land from indigenous Americans. Soon, playing “Cowboys and Indians” became part of American boyhood and gun ownership became a part of American masculinity.

It should be no surprise, then, that 62 percent of gun owners are male, according to the Pew Research Center. While over a third of gun owners are women, their reasons for owning a gun are on average different from men’s reasons. Female gun owners are four times more likely to state that the only reason they own a gun is for self-protection. For male gun owners, the reasons are more diverse: men who own guns are more likely to go hunting or shooting, visit websites and watch TV programs or videos about guns, go to gun shows, and join groups of fellow gun owners. While gun ownership for women is more likely to be about their own protection, for men, it is more likely to be about how they define themselves as men.

But there are other social differences in gun ownership rates as well. While only 20 percent of people living in cities report owning a gun, 29 percent of people living in suburbs do, and 41 percent of people in rural areas say they own a gun. Gun ownership also increased during the coronavirus pandemic, as did violent crime statistics. Gun ownership rates are higher among Republicans (44 percent) than among Democrats (20 percent), are highest in the American South and Mountain states, and lowest in the Northeast and on the West Coast. According to the 2021 National Firearms Survey, gun ownership is higher among whites (34 percent) than among Latinos (28 percent), Blacks (25 percent), and Asian Americans (19 percent). The highest rates of gun ownership are among households earning over $100,000 per year (20 percent), compared to just 6 percent in households earning under $100,000.

Weapons in Other Nations

Other nations have a tradition of using weapons, too. In many cases, it’s more a matter of honoring their military forces than arming their private citizens. The British, for example, don’t normally arm their police officers. Instead, British “bobbies” patrol their beats with only a nightstick for protection. Amazing as it may seem, British criminals seem to play by the same rules. For the most part, they do not use guns in their crimes.

The nations of East Asia invented the martial arts, including karate and kung fu, and weapons like fighting stars and sticks. Many martial arts movies show the training and the discipline necessary to master these ways of fighting, but they fail to explain the rules and philosophy behind many of them. They do not make it clear that for many, this kind of violence is used only for self-defense. It is considered the last step to be taken when there is no other way to solve matters peacefully.

Weapon Use and the Media

It has been estimated that the typical child in the United States witnesses more than 200,000 acts of violence, including 25,000 murders, in the mass media—television, films, popular music, magazines and newspapers, video games, and the Internet—by the time they are eighteen. Fifteen-year-old Kipland Kinkel, who murdered his parents and several schoolmates in Springfield, Oregon, in 1998, attributed his troubled state of mind to “role-playing games, heavy-metal music, violent cartoons/TV, and sugared cereal.” According to Barry Kristberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, “The violence in the media and the easy availability of guns are what’s driving the slaughter of the innocents.”

Others say that most young people can easily tell the difference between what’s real and what’s make-believe. They remind us that millions of television watchers grow up normally without being troubled or influenced by the violence they see. Nobody really knows the long-term effects of viewing so much violence. It’s scary to think that acts of violence on television may cause the same acts to happen in real life.

This, however, is fact: the “tools of violence” are all around young people today. In 2021, four in ten American adults lived in a household with a gun, according to the Pew Research Center, while 30 percent said they personally owned a gun. According to Gun Policy News, there are more than 110 million handguns owned by American civilians. And while assault weapons are a key weapon in mass shootings, 59 percent of gun murders involve handguns.

According to Daniel Gross, founder of the anti-gun violence group the Center to Prevent Youth Violence, these statistics explain a lot about the rise in teen violence. “The reality is, these tragedies make a lot of sense,” Gross said. “Everybody wonders: How do kids get this way? How does something like this happen? I’ll tell you exactly how: the kids had access to guns.”

Taking a Chance

Many agree that guns themselves are not bad. Most guns in private hands are meant for hunting or sports shooting, not for hurting people. Some are in private collections. Other weapons are kept by their owners for protection against crime. The vast majority of weapons never cause a problem.

But where there’s a weapon, there’s always the chance that it may get into the wrong hands and/or be used for the wrong purpose. That means there’s always a need for the owner of that weapon to take extra precautions to make sure this doesn’t happen.