Brandon del Pozo, a Brown University scholar who started out as a New York cop, called his research an urgent wake-up call for tackling gun crime and murder rates in America s grittiest cities.
A new study that finds handgun carriage by adolescents has gone up significantly over the past two decades. The jump 41% was especially pronounced among rural, white, and higher-income adolescents, according to the study, which was published by the American Academy of Pediatrics. The study was based on nationally representative surveys conducted annually from 2002 to 2019 of about 300,000 12-17-year-olds.
“The big finding was that [gun] carriage increased substantially. That translated to hundreds of thousands of adolescents,” said Naoka Carey, a co-author of the study and a doctoral candidate at Boston College.