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Chrissy Stroop: What young Americans really think about gun violence [1]

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Date: 2023-08

Fear of school shootings (as unlikely as any individual may be to actually experience them) exerts a strong impact. “School safety is a major concern for youth and worry about school shootings is associated with a host of negative mental health outcomes,” reads one of the report’s findings.

We can hardly dismiss these fears as irrational, given that gun violence is the leading cause of death for children and teens in the States, having surpassed road crashes in 2020.

The new report highlights that three million American youth are exposed to shootings each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the US’s national public health agency. That is bound to have an impact even if the numbers of minors killed (roughly 3,500) and injured (15,000) in shootings are orders of magnitude lower – though that is still an appalling number of dead and injured children and far exceeds the norm among peer nations.

While the report clearly shows that a solid majority of young Americans want more restrictions on gun ownership, it also found partisan differences. Tracking correlations between political alignment and other attitudes is standard practice for such social surveys.

Just over 28% of respondents reported being members of “at least one gun-related club or organization”, while identification with “gun culture” (a term the survey’s designers left to respondents to define) correlates with being white, living in a rural area, and identifying as Republican.

The report’s findings include a “moderate” association between identifying more strongly as Republican and a higher so-called “racial resentment score” (derived from an index that assesses “feelings toward Black people” among other things), as well as support for male supremacy (identified through agreement with statements such as “women cannot help but be attracted to those who are higher in status than they are” and “women use feminism to gain an unfair advantage over men”).

Some 16% of young Americans hold male supremacist views, the report found. Conversely, those who identify more strongly as Democrats tended to identify as women and to score lower on racial resentment and male supremacy. Male supremacist beliefs also correlated weakly with a higher belief that the second amendment to the US constitution (the right to bear arms) gives citizens the right to overthrow the government.

Little faith in government

Interestingly, youth across the political spectrum have little faith in institutions or government to address the US’s gun violence problem. Given the paucity of action successive US governments have taken to regulate gun ownership – despite overwhelming evidence that decreased access to guns results in lower gun violence – I can’t say I blame the youth for feeling this way.

The report’s authors argue that a better understanding of young people’s attitudes toward guns and gun violence, including what narratives they find most convincing, should help advocates counter right-wing radicalisation among young Americans, and convince young people that government can be part of the solution.

To be frank, I struggle with this myself – not with the belief that governments in general can function to prevent gun violence, but more specifically with believing that the US government can. And so long as our federal government gives Republicans disproportionate power due to a variety of unfair structural advantages (equal state representation in the Senate gives unfair influence to predominantly rural states with a low population density, for example), it will be difficult to convince the large majority of youth who want a less violent America that their government can help bring that better future about.

There is no clear immediate path to the major structural reforms my country needs, but I hope I live to see the day when the achievement of a fairer, more functional America becomes realistic, and with it the ability of our government to – at long last – effectively address the scourge of gun violence.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/chrissy-stroop-us-youth-attitudes-on-guns-report/

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