A Comprehensive Investigation of the Links between Exposure to Gun Violence and Adolescent Delinquency

Background and Purpose: Over the past decades, a growing volume of research has investigated the mechanisms of adolescent delinquency from diverse angles, such as individual traits, social connections, school atmospheres, and community contexts. However, there has been limited empirical research specifically addressing the impacts of gun violence on adolescent delinquency. Therefore, this research examined the correlation between community gun violence and adolescent delinquency. It aimed to answer two key research questions: (1) Does gun violence within the vicinity of 500 or 1,000 meters from schools correlate with delinquent behaviors among adolescents at the age of 15? (2) After adjusting for various covariates at multiple levels, does gun violence occurring within 500 or 1,000 meters of residences relate to delinquent behaviors among adolescents at age 15?

Methods: The study utilized data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study, which followed participants through six waves. Our analysis focused on 3,595 families who took part in the sixth wave (age 15) of the study. Adolescent delinquency was measured by a 13-item scale adopted from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. Adolescents’ exposure to gun violence was obtained on September 1, 2017, from the Gun Violence Archive. This measure reflected the number of serious and potentially deadly incidents involving firearms that occurred in the past year within 500 and 1,000 meters of home and school. Covariates include community-level covariates (neighborhood collective efficacy, economic disadvantage, residential instability, and racial heterogeneity), interpersonal covariates (peer delinquency, internalizing and externalizing problems, ADD/ADHD diagnosis, impulsivity, prior delinquency (Age 9)), and demographic information. The path analysis was conducted in Mplus 8 (Muthén & Muthén, 2017) using full information maximum likelihood to handle missing data.

Results: This model had a satisfactory fit according to most indexes: CFI = .95, TLI = .92, RMSEA = .03, and SRMR = .03. More incidents within 1,000m of the home but fewer incidents within 500m of the home were associated with more delinquent behaviors. No association was found for school-centered gun violence variables. These results emerged after controlling for the expected associations linking key covariates at the community, interpersonal, and individual levels with greater adolescent delinquency at age 15, including lower neighborhood collective efficacy, greater peer delinquency, less internalizing and more externalizing symptoms, positive diagnosis of ADD/ADHD, greater impulsivity, and greater prior delinquency at age 9.

Conclusions and Implications: This study distinguished between the effects of gun violence incidents occurring at varying distances from both school and home. This research represents one of the pioneering efforts to closely examine this issue using a national dataset. Particularly, the differing findings between gun violence incidents within 1,000m and 500m of home addresses suggest a need for future research to explore the significance of specific locations of such incidents and their respective impacts. The study's findings provide valuable empirical evidence from a community psychology standpoint, informing interventions aimed at addressing the traumatic effects of gun violence on adolescents.