Xavier Taylor was just 13 years old when he bought his first gun on the street. He grew up in neighborhoods with high levels of violence in Houston and East St. Louis, Illinois, so he felt he needed a gun to protect himself.
“When I was younger, my dad always told me to just keep a gun on me. It always stuck with me,” said Taylor, who is now 17 and a youth advocate at The Forgotten Third, a Houston nonprofit that provides mentorship and support to young people. “You see everyone around you have guns.”
Taylor typifies the experience of many young Black men in high-crime cities who feel they need guns to survive, according to new research that could help shape more effective strategies to combat gun violence.
For the study, researchers from historically Black colleges and universities interviewed more than 350 African American men between 15 and 24 who either owned a gun or had owned one recently. The men lived in Wilmington, Delaware; Jackson, Mississippi; Baltimore; and Houston.
More than two out of three of the study’s participants described their home cities with negative terms, like “violent,” “dangerous,” or “crazy.” All of the participants cited safety as the primary reason for carrying a firearm, saying they wanted to protect themselves from people they were “beefing with.” Many said they were introduced to guns by friends or family and had handled them before they turned 15. A few reported that they were younger than 10 when they held a firearm for the first time.
The study was published in the Delaware Journal of Public Health in June and announced by the Crime and Justice Research Alliance in October. It was supported by a grant from the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research.
The young men interviewed in the study cited social media, peer influences, and a lack of role models as drivers of violence in their communities, but the researchers also pointed to easy access to guns as fueling the problem.
Howard Henderson, a Texas Southern University professor who co-authored the study, said that understanding how young people perceive their communities provides insights into preventing gun violence. “Unless you actually have conversations with individuals who are intimately associated with the problem,” he said, “you may or may not necessarily get a chance to understand the nuances involved in the issues.”
Andrew Papachristos, a Northwestern University sociology professor who was not involved in the study but has conducted research on the illegal gun trade, said the findings underscore a common misperception among Americans who believe that buying a gun will make them safer, even though evidence shows that owning a firearm increases the risk of harm. “That feeling of fear and safety beats out any perceived risk of the gun itself,” he said.
Kathryn Bocanegra, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Chicago’s Jane Addams College of Social Work, said that by framing Black youth as perpetrators or victims of violence, the research runs the risk of reinforcing harmful stereotypes. Still, she commended the study’s emphasis on the need for community investment to tackle violence’s root causes.
“They refer back to the community as experts,” Bocanegra said in an email, “and I hope that government officials, funders, and other entities with the resources and/or power to effectively respond to issues related to violence will acknowledge systems and structures that reproduce harm in these communities.”
For community violence prevention groups, the findings were unsurprising. Many said that in under-resourced city neighborhoods, crime is often a byproduct of the environment. Despite making up just 2 percent of the U.S. population, Black males between 15 and 34 years old account for 37 percent of all firearm homicide victims, according to a September report from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.
Jackson, Mississippi — where men were interviewed for the study — is one of the most impoverished cities in the country.
Fredrick Womack, the executive director of the Jackson anti-violence group Operation Good, said a lot of Black males there become the primary breadwinners for their families at a young age. “We have had young men who were doing good in school, doing good in sports, doing good in life, but because of the community they were in, they ended up in jail,” Womack said. “We have to change the environment in order to change the mindset.”
At The Forgotten Third in Houston, Asa Singleton went through one of the organization’s programs after a school altercation landed him on probation when he was a teenager. Now 24, Singleton works at the nonprofit as a full-time youth violence prevention specialist.
Singleton said he had carried firearms for as long as he could remember. He was exposed to guns at an early age by friends and relatives. He currently owns two handguns, which he purchased legally.
“It’s hard to help a young man or young woman get to where they’re going when they have a lot of risk factors and not enough protective factors around them,” he said. “In the hood, it’s kind of not normal to walk around with no firearm.”
