I strongly suspect that "Youth Gun Carrying" correlates to lower homicide rates. That is probably why the study did not include that comparison.
Does it surprise you to learn that teenagers in Wyoming, New Mexico, and Virginia are more likely to report having carried a gun in the last month than teenagers in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York? Does it worry you? Ziming Xuan and David Hemenway, the authors of a study published yesterday by JAMA Pediatrics, think it should, and CNN seems to agree. What's not clear is why.
Xuan and Hemenway looked at responses to the following question in the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey: "During the past 30 days, on how many days did you carry a gun?" Notably, the survey does not ask why respondents carried a gun. Maybe they went hunting or target shooting. Maybe they are on a high school riflery team. Maybe they used a gun to defend themselves, to scare off a burglar, or to rob a bank.
Xuan and Hemenway simply assume that carrying a gun is bad, and they proceed to link that frightening phenomenon to the strictness of each state's firearm regulations, based on three years of survey data from 38 states. Not surprisingly, the states with strict gun laws, which also tend to be the states with the lowest rates of gun ownership, are the ones where high school students are least likely to report having carried a gun at least once during the previous month. Or as Xuan and Hemenway put it:
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I think if I were to be interviewed by these two they would have night mares for the rest of their lives. I would not even try to count the times I carried a gun from the time I was 15.
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