About 25% of rural youth in a University of Washington analysis said they were as young as 12 when they began carrying handguns and 20% of the roughly 2,000 rural youth and young adults studied carried a handgun at least 40 times during the last 12 months that they self-reported that activity, according to research published this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“This is especially pertinent considering the high rates of firearm suicide in rural areas; so, developing and refining interventions to prevent firearm injury in these settings are going to be very important,” Dr. Ali Rowhani-Rahbar, a physician and University of Washington epidemiology professor, told Juvenile Justice Information Exchange.
Continued Rowhani-Rahbar, a study co-author, citing one of the most important findings: “About one in three youth growing up in rural areas reported carrying a handgun by age 26 … This needs to be placed within the context of gun culture and safety in rural areas.”
Based on what public school students in seven states self-reported about themselves from 2005 through 2019, other key study findings were these:
• 30% of those studied said they’d carried a gun between the ages of 12 and 26.
• 53.2% of those carrying a gun between the ages of 12 and 26 said they had done so just once.
• 5.3% to 7.4% of studied adolescents said they had carried a gun.
• 8.9% to 10.9% of those aged 23 through 26 said they had carried a gun.
Of those studied residents of Colorado, Kansas, Maine, Oregon, Utah and Washington, 51.9% were male and the remainder were female. By race, 65.4% were White and 26.6% were Hispanic or Latinx.
