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Lincoln Memorial University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

Abstract

Handguns play a significant role in criminal activity. About 66% of all murders and 40% of robberies involve firearms. Because there are about than 470 residents for each full-time police officer in America, the police cannot effectively protect individual citizens. According to the differential association theory, criminality is a product of shared values, motives, drives, rationalizations, and attitudes that can be influenced by perceptions of the legal code. Democrats and Republicans have different views on reducing social harm via gun-control legal codes, and each political party creates its own unique ambience. Indeed, because each political party believes that its gun-control platform is best, it is important to know how children are responding to the issue in each political partisanship jurisdiction. Because gun-related research is essential for public safety, and because funding for gun violence research comprises less than 0.1% of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s annual budget, additional research is important for better understanding the issue. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine if there is a difference between Democrat and Republican states in the percentage of male high school students who carry handguns in their respective jurisdictions. This study examined electronic second-hand data collected in 2013, 2015, and 2017 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The results of logistic regression for repeated measures indicate that there is a statistically significant relationship between male high school students who carry handguns and political party. Male high school students were 77.4% more likely to carry handguns in Republican states than in Democrat states.

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