Dangerous mix fuels shootings by teens
Bravado, access to guns cited in cases in 3 cities
CHICAGO — A 1 a.m. shooting at a party in downtown St. Louis kills one and injures nearly a dozen. Gunmen open fire during a fight near Florida’s Hollywood Beach, injuring nine, including a 1-year-old. Bursts of gunfire at a sweet 16 party in Dadeville, Ala., kill four and wound more than 30.
What these and other recent mass shootings share in common is they all involve suspects in their teens, highlighting what can be a deadly mix of teenage bravado and impulsiveness with access to guns.
The days when many teens opted to fight out disagreements with fists seem quaint by comparison.
Reaching for a gun is the default these days for some teens who are as quick to take offense as to pull a trigger, agreed Rodney Phillips, a 50-year-old former Chicago Black Disciples leader who works with gang members nationwide to tamp down festering beefs.
“Now, the first thing out of their mouths is, ‘I’m gonna kill you.’ It’s the brazenness of [the shootings], the reckless abandon, doing it in public places,” Phillips said. “It wasn’t like that when I came up.”
Among the solutions to reducing teen violence, Jones said, was to keep expanding programs offering young people activities in safe spaces, including movie and music nights.
More firearms, and even more powerful firearms, have enabled teens, or anyone wielding a gun, to maim and kill more people in single incidents.
A handgun fired at the April Sweet 16 party — in a dance studio crammed with up to 60 people — had been altered to shoot more rapidly, Alabama Special Agent Jess Thornton told a court hearing.
“Witnesses said it sounded like a machine gun,” the investigator said. Afterward, 89 bullet casings littered the scene.
Bullets riddled walls and shattered glass at the shooting in a fifth-floor office in St. Louis on June 18. Police released photos of two young men clutching apparent AK-style rifles. One detained suspect was 17.
In many cities, illegal guns are never too far out of reach.
In areas with high gang activity, some guns are stolen from homes, gun stores, or trains. To lower the risk of being stopped by police while in possession of guns, gang members typically hide them nearby.
Powerful firearms became more readily available starting in the 1980s, before which knives and low-caliber pistols were often the weapons of choice by teens who killed, said James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology, law, and public policy at Northeastern University in Boston.
“Teenagers tend to be trigger happy,” he said. “They’ll pull the trigger without fully thinking about the consequences."
According to FBI data, around 90 percent of homicides in 2019 by teens 15 to 17 involved firearms, up from around 60 percent in 1980. Fox, though, said the rise in homicides by teens hasn’t correlated directly with the rising numbers of guns.
Just how many guns are around and available to teens is impossible to know. The Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey estimated in 2018 that there were some 390 million guns held by civilians in the United States, more than those held by civilians in the other top 25 countries combined.
St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones said causes of the kind of violence that occurred Sunday are complex. Among the problems she highlighted was a trend of teenagers spilling into downtown St. Louis for late-night parties, with parents sometimes dropping them off. “Downtown is not a 1 a.m. destination for your 15-year-old,” she said.
Investigators in St. Louis, Alabama, and Florida didn’t immediately suggest motives for the shootings. But indications are tensions rose suddenly in each.
Pushing and shoving between two groups preceded the Memorial Day shooting in Florida, when members of one group pulled guns and fired at the other and at bystanders, an affidavit alleged. Among those charged: a 15-year-old, a 16-year-old, and an 18-year-old.
In the heat of the moment, peer pressure can contribute to a minor dispute spinning out of control. Fox said around a third of homicides by teens involve two or more people.
“Sometimes, no one individual wants to do the crime but everyone thinks everyone else wants to do it,” he said. “No one wants to be ostracized by the group.”