When I was in high school, there was a girl I had a crush on, but who was dating someone else. She’d flirt with me, but I figured it was just playfulness on her part rather than a real interest. Still, she had a boyfriend, which means it was a no-go area for one and all. However, rumor said he was abusive to her.
It was the first time I’d heard such a thing in person. I’d seen the news reports about it, obviously, and my father recounted some of that from his job as a police officer, so I knew it was a thing, but I didn’t expect to see it in high school, even if it was just a rumor without any evidence.
I thought about that this morning when I read this piece from Psychology Today.
Now, PT is a notoriously anti-gun publication, and we routinely smack around some of the so-called reports on guns, violence, and the like because, frankly, they’re stupid.
This one is about teen dating violence, and it’s about when a gun enters the discussion.
Teen dating violence can involve insults, controlling behavior, sexual coercion, or physical assault. In some relationships, it also involves a firearm.
Although firearms are the most common weapon used in adolescent intimate partner homicides, relatively little research has examined how guns are used before anyone is killed. A firearm may be displayed, pointed, or mentioned during an argument. A teenager may threaten to shoot a partner, another person, or themselves. Even pretending to have a gun can be used to intimidate or control someone.
Now, a new study published in Psychology of Violence suggests that these behaviors may be far more common than many adults realize.
A Hidden Form of Dating Violence
In the study, a team of researchers led by Laura Stevens of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN, studied 722 adolescents attending four public high schools in one county in the southeastern United States. All had been in a dating relationship, and their average age was just over 16. Nearly half identified as Black, and about one in five identified as a sexual or gender minority. Two of the schools served especially high-poverty communities.
The researchers developed a 10-item measure of firearm-related dating violence with input from community members, young adults, firearm owners, and local researchers. The questions covered ways to threaten, coerce, or harm a dating partner with firearms.
More than 15 percent of the adolescents reported experiencing at least one form of firearm-related dating violence. Another 8.6 percent reported perpetrating it. That translates to roughly one in seven being victimized and one in 12 acknowledging that they had used some form of firearm-related threat or intimidation against a partner.
The researchers acknowledged the limitations of their study, to their credit, but there seems to be something missing from this equation. Where in the hell did a teenager get a gun in the first place?
With an average age of a bit over 16, most of the participants and their partners were too young to lawfully purchase any firearm, much less the handguns that are most commonly used to threaten others. So, that means these aren’t likely to be lawfully obtained firearms, at least in most cases, and I can’t help but wonder how that impacted the data.
Keep in mind that “high-poverty communities” can and often does translate into “high-crime communities.” That means gangs and gang culture, even among those who haven’t actually joined a gang. A high degree of criminality correlates strongly with hyper-aggressive adolescent males in these areas, which will likely mean they’re more likely to be aggressive toward partners.
So you have criminal youth with criminally obtained guns threatening dating partners in high-crime communities.
While Psychology Today resisted, somehow, the calls for gun control in this particular piece, I can’t help but think that others will make that call for them, and it would be ridiculously stupid for them to do so.
But studies like this often demonize lawful gun ownership, all without researchers asking where these young people got the guns in the first place. Sure, some of them may well have been middle-class kids who had access to a gun because Mom and Dad thought they were more mature than they actually are, but a lot of them aren’t. Most of them probably aren’t.
And while this will likely come up in some anti-gunners’ defense of gun control, the truth is that the question not asked is the central problem with all of this.
I’m not saying it’s good that young people are the victims of such abuse, even by implication. It’s anything but. Any kind of abuse is inexcusable, and younger people need to learn early that it’s inexcusable. The introduction of a gun into a tense situation among people with a profound lack of impulse control makes it even more important that they learn the lesson.
Still, it shouldn’t be ignored that the laws of the land already make it clear that this kind of thing isn’t supposed to happen in the first place. The fact that it does represents a gun control failure, so don’t let them try to reframe it.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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