Citation

Blair RJR. Am. J. Psychiatry 2020; 177(9): 797-798.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, American Psychiatric Association)

DOI

10.1176/appi.ajp.2020.20071041

PMID

32867520

Abstract

Gun violence is a serious public health concern, particularly in the United States, which has a gun homicide rate that is 25 times higher than the average respective rates of other comparable affluent nations (1). Notably, these gun homicides are disproportionately committed by adolescents and young adults between the ages of 12 and 24 years, making the understanding and reduction of youth gun violence a critical concern. There are a number of variables known to be associated with adolescent gun use, including, but not limited to, peer gun carrying, IQ, parental supervision, violence exposure, and neighborhood dysfunction. Variables that have received very little attention in this regard, despite their considerable utility in understanding youth antisocial behavior more generally, are callous-unemotional traits (2). Callous-unemotional traits are defined by reduced guilt, empathic concern, and displays of appropriate emotion (2). Work on these traits, with respect to prognosis and neurobiology, led to their inclusion in DSM-5 as a specifier for conduct disorder labeled "with limited prosocial emotions." The article by Robertson and colleagues (3), published in this issue of the Journal, focuses on the associations between gun use and gun carrying and callous-unemotional traits. In their study, Robertson and colleagues indexed, via self-report, callous-unemotional traits, gun ownership, and peer gun carrying at first arrest in 1,215 male juvenile offenders and then gun carrying and gun use in a crime every 6 months for 36 months (and once more at 48 months). The authors report that callous-unemotional traits predict both the frequency of gun carrying at first arrest and the use of a gun during the commission of a serious crime in the 48 months after first arrest. Specifically, every one-point increase in callous-unemotional traits was associated with a 7.6% increase in the likelihood of carrying a gun and a 6.9% increase in the probability of using a gun during a violent crime, after accounting for other predictive variables. In addition, the study demonstrates that callous-unemotional traits moderate the relationship between peer gun carrying and participant gun carrying. While peer gun carrying is positively associated with participant gun carrying in participants with low to medium levels of callous-unemotional traits, this association is nonsignificant in individuals with high levels of callous-unemotional traits...

Language: en

Keywords

Firearms; and Conduct Disorders; Child/Adolescent Psychiatry; Disruptive; Forensic Psychiatry; Gun Violence; Impulse-Control; Violence/Aggression