Weapon Carrying and Brandishing Among Youth: A Call to Think Beyond General Strain Theory

Weapon carrying and brandishing among youth is a serious public health issue. Recent data from the Centers for Disease Control’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey suggests that as many as 1 in 15 male and 1 in 50 female students have carried a gun for nonrecreational purposes within the past 12 months. When examining weapon carrying more broadly, approximately one in eight adolescents report this behavior in the past 30 days alone. Within the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, several manuscripts have explored this topic in recent years in hopes of identifying causes and contributing to prevention. As a reviewer for the journal, and as a scholar and social services practitioner whose work focuses on interpersonal violence, I share these authors’ investment in preventing youth weapon carrying and brandishing, addressing related harms such as bullying, and creating safer and more affirming environments for youth. However, I have grown increasingly concerned by the dominance of general strain theory (GST) in this literature. In this commentary, I argue that overreliance on GST as a causal framework has produced an overemphasis on immediate and microlevel explanations and a corresponding neglect of root causes and systemic injustice. Such limitations may be addressed through adopting additional or alternative frameworks that will allow scholars to incorporate multilevel factors. This will contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of weapon carrying and brandishing among youth, and thus more effective prevention measures.