When Andrew Block headed Virginia’s Department of Juvenile Justice, he noted that kids were more likely to have serious legal problems if they carried a gun, and in some communities that was quite common. Now a professor at UVA’s Law School, he heads a clinic that does research and advises state and local government. He, his students and staff reached out to about 60 people – many of them under the age of 25 – to find out why they felt the need for a weapon.
“You don’t want to be perceived as weak or soft, and you also want to show that you’re someone not to be messed with," he explains.
Young people also felt fear and wanted a gun for self-protection. Acquiring one was easy, and the Internet told them what they needed to know:
“How to buy a gun, how to use a gun It’s cool to have a gun."
And social media played a toxic role – promoting youth gun violence.
"Some little beef at school or in the community gets brought online, and then you have a much broader audience," Block says. "People, sadly, are not really violence interrupters online. They’re escalators."
This problem, Block adds, is not widespread. It’s concentrated in predominantly Black communities with relatively high rates of crime, and officials are already trying to address it.
“Local governments in the Hampton Roads area, the Richmond area, Charlottesville, Roanoke, Danville are all devoting resources, often with state support, to these very specific neighborhoods where gun violence is the biggest problem, and the good news, it seems to be having a positive effect. Gun violence is going down or has been going down since it peaked during the pandemic.”
The report provides support for continued efforts, and while the number of people interviewed is statistically small, the answers Block and his team got were powerful.
“We could have just looked at academic literature and data," block says, "but to me research of this kind has an extra power to it, because you’re talking about the people who are experiencing the problems, and you can use their voices and perspectives to inform our thinking about how we can tackle these persistent and challenging issues.”
Among other things, the report – entitled In Their Own Voices – suggests Virginia’s new governor should invest more in gun violence prevention and limit access to firearms. At the local level, communities should provide more safe places where young people can hang-out.
"At the end of the day it’s not that complicated. They need to feel safe," block concludes. "They need to feel connected and need to feel supported, and if we can make young people feel that way and believe that they don’t have to carry a gun to protect themselves, then all kinds of good things are possible."
Communities might also encourage partnerships between people with so-called lived experience and police, teach kids and young adults to make better decisions, offer mentoring services and help young people to think more critically about the dangers of social media.
Copy and paste to read the report: https://www.law.virginia.edu/document/their-own-voices-report/view, and if you’d like to Zoom into a roundtable discussion of this issue, e-mail Professor Andrew Block for an invitation: ablock@virginia.edu.
