Residents’ perception of disorder in their neighborhoods — litter, abandoned buildings, public drug use, robust police presence — may be leading more young people to carry a gun, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Mississippi.
“The literature and the research have shown that adolescents are the most likely to carry a gun out of all the weapons out there,” said Joshua Rosenbaum, a PhD candidate studying juvenile delinquency and lead author of the study, which examined how people perceive social breakdown within a community. The phenomenon, known as perceived neighborhood disorder, is an established concept in criminology, but its connections to firearm violence are not as well understood. The research team was prompted to dive deeper into ties between the two as gun violence has become the leading cause of death for children and teens in the U.S.
In the study, researchers analyzed the relationship between perceived neighborhood disorder, exposure to violence, and the likelihood of an adolescent carrying a gun to school. To understand the link, they used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, an assessment commonly used in criminology data analysis, to gather parents’ perceptions of physical and social disorder within their community. After assessing their answers to questions about the presence of substance abuse or trash on the streets, the authors then compared parents’ responses to whether their child carried a firearm to school.
They found that the children of parents who perceived their neighborhoods as disorderly were 1.33 times more likely to carry a gun to school. The researchers also found that perceived neighborhood disorder increases adolescents’ odds of being exposed to violence by 14 percent.
“It is consistent with what is found in the literature,” said Anika Proctor, another of the study’s authors. “What I found very interesting is the gendered aspect.”
According to the study, young men were about 10 times more likely to report carrying a gun to school compared to their female counterparts. Also, compared to white adolescents, teenagers who were Latino or “part of another racial minority” were more than two times more likely to be exposed to violence, while Black respondents were 70 percent more likely.
The study adds to recent efforts by researchers to understand the connections between living conditions and public health improvements. Addressing factors including urban heat, community programming investment, and neighborhood clean-ups are all part of a larger academic shift toward comprehensive approaches to firearm violence deterrence, instead of punitive methods. These types of initiatives are key to reducing violence, researchers said, because they focus on investing in residents rather than approaches, like gentrification, that have historically displaced longtime community members and led to violence elsewhere.
“We were interested in finding proactive risk factors that can potentially deter [gun violence],” Rosenbaum said.
In Tennessee, a community organization is working to bridge the gap between trash and crime through initiatives like neighborhood clean-ups, tree planting, and art.
“Past criminology theories have basically stated that if you see an abandoned space, or lot, or broken glass, then that is a space that invites crime,” said Jaffee Judah, co-founder of Recycle & Reinvest, based in Nashville. “Although true in a sense, I don’t think it was thought through because it invited police to go into these communities rather than build up community leaders and allow them to do their own policing.”
One of the initiatives that Judah’s organization operates is a paid development program called the Soil Soldiers, which teaches students from marginalized communities and juvenile detention centers about sustainability and environmental justice, or what he calls “reach[ing] out on a human level.”
“We have kind of turned the ‘broken windows theory’ upside on its head.”
Other recent work that has looked into the relationship between adolescence and gun carrying found that young people from racial and ethnic minorities who carried a gun in the past year were almost five times more likely to use telehealth services like virtual therapy, and there may be a connection between remote health services and gun violence prevention.
In the University of Mississippi study on neighborhood disorder, the authors similarly conclude that free community mental health services, like accessible telehealth, were interconnected to violence exposure, gun-carrying, and perceived community order.
“It’s a very fine line between knowing what empirically would be the best, but then also how to effectively communicate that to practitioners,” said Mason Myers, a lifelong Mississippian and an author of the study. She noted other solutions that are focused on working with law enforcement and parents to practice safe storage, and communicate how these policies can be backed by scientific research.
“You’re not necessarily telling them what they need to do from the ivory academic tower,” Myers said, “but putting it in a way to say, ‘Hey, this is how we can improve what you’re doing, and this is how we can make not only your job better, but also the outcomes of your job better.’”
