Roughly one-third of young males and 1 in 10 females in rural communities have carried a handgun, reports a new 91̽�� study. And, the study found, many of those rural kids started carrying as early as the sixth grade.

“This is one of the first longitudinal studies of rural adolescent handgun carrying across multiple states in the U.S. It provides evidence that youth handgun carrying in these settings is not uncommon,” said lead author , a 91̽��associate professor of epidemiology and co-director of Firearm Injury & Policy Research Program at Harborview Injury Prevention & Research Center.

The study of rural communities across the country, in the Journal of Adolescent Health, also found the practice was associated with pro-handgun attitudes and with having friends who carry handguns.

Knowing that some kids as young as 12 report carrying a handgun indicates that firearm violence and injury-related prevention programs may need to be introduced early in a child’s life, researchers say.

“Youth handgun carrying and firearm violence are often presented as an exclusively inner-city problem,” said Dr. Rowhani-Rahbar, who is the Bartley Dobb Professor for the Study and Prevention of Violence in the 91̽��School of Public Health. “However, that focus should not come at the cost of ignoring non-urban settings. Indeed, youth in some rural areas experience similar or even higher rates of handgun carrying and certain forms of interpersonal violence –– for example, being attacked or threatened with a weapon –– than their counterparts in urban areas.”

Specifically, the researchers found:

• In sixth grade, 11.5% of males and 2.8% of females had carried a handgun within the past year.
• From the sixth grade to age 19, 33.7% of males and 9.6% of females reported carrying at least once during that time.
• Of those who carried, 34% of males and 29.3% of females had carried a handgun for the first time in the sixth grade. However, of those who carried, a majority of both sexes carried a handgun only once over the seven years.
• More kids who carried had friends who did the same. For instance, in the 10th grade, 63% of males who carried had a friend who carried. And of those young males who had not carried a handgun, only 6% had a friend who did. The same pattern was apparent for females.
• A far higher percentage of kids who carried also endorsed pro-handgun norms. For instance, they were much more likely to view taking a handgun to school or work as “not very wrong” than their non-carrying peers.

The study of handgun carrying among rural youth is based on 2,002 kids who started answering survey questionnaires in the sixth grade when they lived in 12 rural communities in seven states. Participants took annual surveys over a seven-year period, 2005 to 2012, as part of the ����’s . That larger study is designed to evaluate the university’s program, which helps communities take a broad approach to preventing youth problem behaviors.

The 12 communities included in the new study had been randomly selected to not implement the Communities That Care prevention program, which has been found to reduce a variety of risky behaviors among youth, including carrying a handgun.

“We looked at handgun questions only in the control communities, those that did not receive the risk prevention program,” Dr. Rowhani-Rahbar explained. “This is because we did not want to measure the effect of the Communities That Care intervention in this study. We wanted to characterize the age at initiation, prevalence and patterns of handgun carrying in the absence of the intervention.”

The dangers of young people’s exposure to guns are well-documented –– firearm injury is second only to vehicle crashes as a among U.S. kids, with 65% of those deaths resulting from a conflict with another young person. Carrying firearms adolescent bullying, physical fighting and assault. The researchers also point out that federal law prohibits people under age 18 from possessing a handgun.

This is just the first step toward studying health effects, Dr. Rowhani-Rahbar said. A lack of foundational information about youth handgun carrying in rural settings means studies of the causes and consequences of this behavior have also been missing. The team now plans to study these factors –– risk of violence or injury among rural youth who carry a handgun compared to those who do not, for instance –– in the near future.

The Communities That Care program and its youth development study are run by the 91̽��School of Social Work’s .

Co-authors are Sabrina Oesterle, who is now at Arizona State University and worked on this study while with the Social Development Research Group in the 91̽��School of Social Work; and , a research scientist with the Social Development Research Group. This research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Want to prevent kids from using drugs and make it stick into young adulthood? Get the community involved and intervene before they’re teens, say researchers from the 91̽��.

A new, longitudinal study from the 91̽�� shows that young adults who grew up in communities that used a coordinated, science-based approach to prevention were more likely to have abstained from substance use, violence and other antisocial behaviors through age 21.

Researchers at the group, part of the 91̽��School of Social Work, examined a decade’s worth of participant data across seven states as they evaluated the effectiveness of the (CTC) prevention system. Their was published online in April in the American Journal of Public Health.

“This study is significant because we show that we have these long-term effects through age 21,” said , lead author and assistant director of the Social Development Research Group. “The youth we have been following weren’t exposed to prevention-oriented programs after middle school, so that suggests that whatever happened by middle school, they carried [those influences] with them, and it’s made such a lasting impact on their lives.”

91̽��social work professors and created Communities That Care, an approach that helps communities organize around prevention, choose programs that are appropriate for their populations, and collect information on young people’s experiences with alcohol, drug and tobacco use, and delinquency. The idea, they say, is to give children, parents, teachers and community members the opportunities and tools to adopt and sustain healthy behaviors. Today, hundreds of cities and towns nationwide use the program.

The study was conducted among 4,400 youth participants in 24 rural communities in Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Oregon, Utah and Washington. Towns were randomly assigned as “control” communities or as intervention communities. Control communities maintained whatever prevention programming was in place, while intervention communities used the CTC system to select evidence-based, prevention-oriented programs according to the risk factors that were found to be higher among their youth. Communities were asked to focus on grades five to nine.

Many intervention communities opted for three to five programs over time, such as classroom-based lessons in life skills, after-school activities like Big Brothers Big Sisters or parent-support classes. Training began in 2003, and selected programs were launched in 2004, when the children were in sixth grade. Monitoring of the participants’ behavior continued for a decade through surveys.

For many of the measured behaviors, participants from intervention communities were more likely to have abstained through age 21 than those in the control group. Among those who had never used substances or engaged in antisocial behavior at the beginning of the study, incidence rates were still generally lower among participants from intervention communities compared to those from control communities.

Results showed:

• The likelihood of abstaining from a “gateway drug” (alcohol, tobacco, or marijuana) through age 21 was 49 percent higher among participants from Communities That Care towns.
• CTC participants were 18 percent more likely to abstain through age 21 from criminal behavior, such as vandalism, theft and illegal use of weapons.
• Among males, participants from intervention communities were significantly more likely to abstain through age 21 from cigarette smoking, marijuana and inhalant use, as well as from antisocial behavior and violence. These differences were smaller among females.
• Although more participants from intervention communities never engaged in these behaviors, the proportion who used drugs or engaged in criminal and violent behavior in the past year did not differ between control and intervention communities.

The gender differences need more study to be fully explained, Oesterle said. One theory is that the risk factors targeted by the prevention programs may be more relevant for boys than girls. Perhaps the kinds of behaviors or “protective factors” that would be more meaningful to girls weren’t emphasized as much in the chosen programs.

In 2004, when the study launched, states had not yet begun legalizing recreational marijuana. Plans for the next phase of the study, pending funding, call for a focus on whether that new access has affected marijuana use for young adults in the study, Oesterle said.

For now, this study reveals broader implications for public health, she said. Communities often want to tackle a problem behavior or head one off, but they don’t always know where to start.

“It shows that if a community invests in a coordinated and data-driven prevention planning system, you have this long-term effect that gets sustained,” Oesterle said. “If a community adopts CTC, they own the process, based on their local culture and values. With Communities That Care, you’re not just focusing on the most high-risk kids; you’re trying to prevent the beginning of problems for everyone.”

Along with Oesterle and Hawkins, other authors of the study were and of the Social Development Research Group and and of the 91̽��Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.

The study was supported by a research grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, with additional funding from the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

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For more information, contact Oesterle at soe@uw.edu or 206-221-4917.

Grant number: R01 DA015183