Kids and guns
Adolescent ownership and use of firearms is a growing concern, and results from the Rochester study suggest the concern is well founded.
By the ninth and tenth grades, more boys own illegal guns (7 percent) than own legal guns (3 percent). Of the boys who own illegal guns, about half of the whites and African-Americans and nearly 90 percent of the Hispanics carry them on a regular basis.
Figure 13 shows a very strong relationship between owning illegal guns and delinquency and drug use. Seventy-four percent of the illegal gunowners commit street crimes, 24 percent commit gun crimes, and 41 percent use drugs. Boys who own legal firearms, however, have much lower rates of delinquency and drug use and are even slightly less delinquent than nonowners of guns.
But I thought it was the availability of guns that lead to . . .
I wonder how boys owning legal guns is defined. After all, you typically have to be 18 to buy a rifle and 21 to buy a handgun. I’m not sure how, legally, a boy can own a firearm other than a parent buys it and gives it to the kid while the parent retains control of it. Still, I find it interesting.
Here’s a link to the whole thing.
November 10th, 2005 at 1:25 pm
I think your correct about the parent purchasing it part. Or grandparent etc.
What it means though ultimatly is that kids who own legal guns invariably have relationships with their parents and other family members who teach them responsibility and make sure they get their homework done before they can go out andplay with the gun.
November 10th, 2005 at 1:25 pm
Of course, liberals (and the gun banners) would never want to suggest that stable 2 parent households – or even simply attentive non drug addict parents – had anything to do with future success.
November 10th, 2005 at 2:45 pm
7 percent? Seems like a number pulled out of someones ass.
November 10th, 2005 at 3:02 pm
That study was done in Rochester, and the notes say “The Rochester Youth Development
Study started with a sample of 1,000 boys and girls in the seventh and eighth
grades of the Rochester public schools. To maximize the number of serious,
chronic offenders available for the study, the sample includes more youth from
high-crime areas and fewer from low-crime areas.”
I definitely wouldn’t use 7% as a national average.
November 10th, 2005 at 3:32 pm
I don’t know any liberal who would disagree with this, so whoever your strawman liberal charicature is must be quite a piece of work!
Where “liberals” disagree with conservatives is in believing that a stable one parent household is not only possible, but it’s preferable to an unstable two-parent household (of which there are many, and would be many more if conservatives had their way), even while conceding that a stable two-parent household is best. We also disagree with conservatives that in order for a two-parent household to be “stable,” the parents must necessarily differ in gender.
So yes, in a perfect world, a stable, two-parent household is best; we in the “reality-based community” just recognize that we don’t live in a perfect world.