Kids, Guns, and Homicide: Policy Notes on an Age-Specific Epidemic

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Concern about the violent young offender is a cyclical phenomenon in the United States, usually lagging a few years behind general public alarm about rising crime rates. The sharp increase in violent crime in the United States between 1965 and 1974 occurred without any particular focus on adolescent offenders. After 1975 and until the beginning of the 1980s, however, youth crime and the young offender became the featured problem in public and legislative debates.1 The moral panic about drugs and drug control that was launched in the mid-1980s, like the reaction to the crime problem in the late 1960s, did not center on young offenders for a number of years. Since about 1993, however, the young offender and particularly the violent young drug offender has been a special target of public anxiety and governmental activity. One aspect of the attention young offenders are getting in the 1990s is brand new, rather than merely a cyclical recurrence. For the first time in modern history, middle-adolescent offenders are being identified as a high-risk and highusage group for firearms. The federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention now issues reports on reducing youth gun violence.2 Drive-by shootings, fear of guns, the demand for metal detectors in schools, proposals for special legislation, these are the youth violence soundbites of the 1990s. The most poignant reminder of the change in public focus was the passage of a federal law that established the creation of as a policy ambition of the national government.3 The sad part of this stated ambition is that gun-free schools were regarded as an accomplished fact for all of previously recorded American history. This essay is a brief examination of three dimensions of the juvenile firearms use epidemic of the period since 1985. Part II of the essay will examine the factual foundation for concerns about rising youth gun use. It will compare