Global Courant
CHICAGO — A 1 a.m. shooting at a party in downtown St. Louis leaves one dead and nearly a dozen wounded. Gunmen open fire during a fight near Hollywood Beach, Florida, injuring nine, including a 1-year-old. Gunfire at a Sweet 16 party in Dadeville, Alabama, kills four and injures more than 30.
What this and other recent mass shootings have in common is that they all involve suspects in their teens, highlighting a deadly mix of teenage bravado and gun-access impulsiveness.
The days when many teens chose to fight out differences with fists seem strange in comparison.
“I remember when I was a kid and we had a fight — somebody got a black eye or a broken nose and[they]lived to tell about it,” St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones told reporters after Sunday’s shooting.
Reaching for a gun is the default these days for some teens who are just as quick to take offense as to pull the trigger, agrees Rodney Phillips, a 50-year-old former Chicago Black Disciples leader who teams up with gang members across the country to festering beef.
“Now, the first thing that comes out of their mouth is, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ It’s the brutality of (the shootings), the reckless abandon, doing it in public places,” Phillips said. “It wasn’t like that when I came.”
The aunt of 17-year-old Makao Moore, who died in the St. Louis shooting, said teens too often express their anger with a gun.
“If we don’t work it out, it’s going to keep happening,” Sharonda Moore told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
One solution to reducing teen violence, Jones said, was to continue to expand programs that offer youth activities in safe spaces, including movie and music nights.
More guns, and even more powerful firearms, have enabled teens, or anyone who wields a gun, to maim and kill more people in some incidents.
A gun fired at April’s Sweet 16 party — in a dance studio packed with up to 60 people — was modified to fire faster, Alabama Special Agent Jess Thornton told a hearing.
“Witnesses said it sounded like a machine gun,” the investigator said. After that, there were 89 shell casings on the scene and there was “blood everywhere”.
Bullet-riddled walls and shattered glass in the shooting at a fifth-floor office in St. Louis. Police have released photos of two young men holding what appear to be AK-style rifles. One arrested suspect was 17.
In many cities, illegal guns are never far away.
In areas of high gang activity, some guns are stolen from homes, gun stores, or trains. To reduce the risk of being stopped by police while in possession of guns, gang members usually hide them nearby, stuffing the guns into walls and into tire rims, he said.
High-powered firearms became more readily available starting in the 1980s, before low-caliber knives and pistols were often the weapons of choice for murdering teens, said James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology, law and public policy at Northeastern University in Boston.
“With guns, teens tend to be happy with the trigger,” he said. “They pull the trigger without really thinking about the consequences.”
According to FBI data, about 90% of homicides in 2019 by teens ages 15 to 17 involved firearms, up from about 60% in 1980. However, Fox said the rise in teen homicides is not directly related to the increasing number of weapons. .
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 owned by citizens in the US, more than those owned by citizens in the other top 25 countries combined.
Mayor Jones said the causes of the type of violence that occurred Sunday are complex. One of the issues she brought up was a trend of teens rushing into downtown St. Louis for all-night parties, with parents sometimes ripping them off.
“Downtown is not a 1am destination for your 15-year-old,” she said. “It’s not a place to drop children off unsupervised.”
Investigators in St. Louis, Alabama and Florida did not immediately suggest motives for the respective shootings. But there are indications that tensions in each of them have suddenly risen.
Donna Rhone, whose son was scratched in the face by a bullet in the St. Louis shooting, told KTVI-TV that partygoers had behaved well before the shooting.
“Then everything changed right away,” Rhone said, referring to her son. “It goes from being so light-hearted to sheer terror.”
When a music speaker fell with a bang at the Alabama party, one person lifted his shirt to reveal a gun, Thornton said. The shooting began after an announcement said those with guns to leave. At least three suspects in the shooting were teenagers.
Pushing and shoving between two groups preceded the Memorial Day shooting in Florida, when members of one group drew guns and fired at the other and bystanders, an affidavit said. Among the accused: a 15-year-old, a 16-year-old and an 18-year-old.
For 2020, the first year of the pandemic, homicides by teens ages 12 to 17 are up nearly 40% compared to the previous year, from 974 to 1,336, according to FBI data. In 2020, there were a total of about 18,000 homicides in the US.
Between 1984 and 1994, homicides by teens aged 12 to 17 rose from 958 to an all-time high of 2,800, according to the FBI. After falling to a low of 700 in 2013, numbers have crept up, although they remain below the mid-1990s number.
When teenagers kill, their victims are often young.
The victims in St. Louis were between the ages of 15 and 19. Those killed in the Alabama shooting were aged 17, 18, 19 and 23, while most of the more than two dozen others injured ranged in age from 14 to 19.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, homicide was the third leading cause of death for people between the ages of 12 and 17 in 2019, behind accidents and suicide. Murder is now the leading cause of death among African American youth.
Philips said social media is another factor leading to teenage violence. Feuds fueled in cyberspace with exchanges of insults can spill over into the real world with exchanges of gunfire.
In the heat of battle, peer pressure can help a petty dispute spiral out of control. Fox said about one-third of teen homicides involve two or more people.
“Sometimes no one wants to commit the crime, but everyone thinks everyone wants to do it,” he said. “No one wants to be ostracized by the group.”
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