Guns and Sublethal Violence

• Author: Jennifer E. Butters,Patricia G. Erickson,James Sheptycki,Serge Brochu
• Published date: 01 December 2011
• DOI: 10.1177/1057567711428963
• Date: 01 December 2011
• Subject Matter: Articles

International Criminal Justice Review
21(4) 402-426
Guns and Sublethal
ª 2011 Georgia State University
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Violence: A Comparative
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DOI: 10.1177/1057567711428963
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Study of At-Risk Youth in
Two Canadian Cities
Jennifer E. Butters1, James Sheptycki2,
Serge Brochu3, and Patricia G. Erickson1
Abstract
This study is the first in Canada to examine gun usage and harm to others, with original interview
data, and aims to identify the correlates of sublethal violence among at-risk youth in Toronto and Mon-
treal. Toronto youth showed 50% higher levels of this violence than Montreal youth. Despite having a
common profile of conduct disorder and prior delinquency, Toronto youth were more involved in
drug selling and the crack trade, and Montreal youth more likely involved in gang fighting. Ready access
to firearms was reported in both locales but faster in Toronto. Logistic regression analysis for predict-
ing using a gun to threaten or try to harm others found that drug selling was only significant in Toronto,
while involvement in the crack trade and gang fighting was significant in both cities. Being able to obtain
a gun in <3 hours was also significantly associated with this violence outcome in both sites. Actually
harming someone with a weapon showed fewer common factors, with only gang fighting being signif-
icant in both cities. The importance of examining local patterns of youth violence, and the need for
more research to assess the meanings youth impart to guns, is emphasized.
Keywords
at-risk youth, violence, weapons, guns, drugs, gangs
Introduction: The Legal Context for Youth Crime and Violence in
Canada
Historically, Canada has taken a predominantly rehabilitative approach to its delinquents,
considering them troublesome youth in need of care and protection, principles nested in the Juvenile
Delinquents Act (JDA) of 1908 (Hogeveen, 2001). ‘‘Delinquents’’ became ‘‘young offenders’’ in
1984 with the passage of a new law, The Young Offenders Act (YOA), replacing the former child
1 Department of Social and Epidemiological Research, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto, ON, Canada
2 Department of Social Science, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada,
3 International Center for Comparative Criminology, Universite´ de Montre´al, Canada
Corresponding Author:
James Sheptycki, York University, Room 034 McLaughlin College, 4700 Keele St. Toronto, ON M3 J 1P3, Canada
Email: jshep@yorku.ca

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Butters et al.
403
welfare philosophy with an emphasis on the protection of the public and the accountability of
youthful law breakers (Bala, 1997). Over the following 15 years, agitation for a ‘‘get tough’’ approach
to youth crime led to a series of amendments increasing sentences and facilitating transfers to adult court
(Hogeveen & Smandych, 2001). The public sentiment supporting this shift was largely driven by fears of
the most serious youth criminality, like murder, and the perceived leniency of the judicial response
(Sprott, 1996). Rates of custodial sentences climbed (Ulzen & Hamilton, 1998), leading to the passage
in 2001 of new legislation which aimed to reserve incarceration for the most serious, violent, and repeat
offenders while providing more community-based supervision for the majority of those charged. When
the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA) came into force in 2003, deviant youth in conflict with the law
became ‘‘young criminals,’’ moving them closer to the notion of adult criminals with responsibility for
their crimes (Hogeveen & Smandych, 2001). Nevertheless, an early assessment concluded that the
Youth Criminal Justice System in Canada appears to have established a balance between the protection
of the community, making offenders accountable, protecting their rights, and managing less serious
offenders with community-based dispositions (Bala, Carrington, & Roberts, 2009).
And what of the focus of the public and political concern, that is the presumed proliferation of
violent young offenders/criminals? During the period between the YOA and the YCJA (1984–
2001), changes in reporting practices and inconsistent provincial records made it difficult to assess
overall trends in violent crime (Carrington, 1995; Corrado & Markwart, 1995). The most reliable
indicator, the youth homicide rate (murders committed by those under the age of 18 years), remained
quite constant (Doob & Sprott, 1998), reflecting about 10% of total homicides, while other forms of
less serious violent crimes by juveniles seemed to rise from 1986 to 1992 and then level off into the
mid-1990s (Harrison, Erickson, Adlaf, & Freeman, 2001; Sprott & Doob, 2008). However, in 1997
to 2006, the violent crime rate by youth rose by 12% (Taylor-Butts & Bressan, 2008). National data
also indicated that most youthful offenses continued to be for nonviolent crimes and that those con-
stituting the ‘‘violence’’ category were predominantly minor assault; only 5% of offenses in 2006
involved a weapon (Schissel, 1993; Taylor-Butts & Bressan, 2008).While in the past, violent crimes
made up only about a quarter of all cases heard at youth court, increasingly after the passage of the
YCJA, less serious cases have been diverted into the community, meaning that the more serious
cases are being heard in court (Schissel, 1993; Taylor-Butts & Bressan, 2008).
It has been argued that the toughening of youth criminal justice policies in Canada is an overreac-
tion, fuelled by media accounts of rare but shocking examples of youth violence, and reflects a moral
panic about the growing threat posed by young criminals (Schissel, 2001; Tanner, 2010). Fear of gun
violence is particularly apt to fuel this sense of public insecurity (Cook, Cukier, & Krause, 2009). In
general, the literature does indicate that weapon possession is associated with increasing the risk of
committing acts of violence (Fagan & Wilkinson, 1998; Wilkinson, 2001) and weapon type is an
important determinant of outcome severity, with guns associated with the most lethal results (Leonard,
1994; Wells & Horney, 2002). However, in Canada, almost no research has been done linking youth
violence specifically to firearms. Other than the observation that Canada did not experience the three-
fold increase in youth homicides attributed to handgun use that was documented in the United States
from 1985 to 1993 (Blumstein, 1995, 2002; Doob & Sprott, 1998; Webster, Gainer, & Champion,
1993), knowledge about gun violence trends is incomplete and inconclusive. Next we shall examine
briefly the general trends around firearms possession, controls, and association with crime in Canada.
The use of firearms to commit crimes poses a particular challenge to social order at an interna-
tional level (Small Arms Survey, 2010), being termed a global gun epidemic (Cukier & Sidel, 2005;
Edwards & Sheptycki, 2009). International comparisons consistently show that the U.S. youth homi-
cide rates are 5 to 6 times greater than those of other Western nations, and about three fourth involve
guns (Pritchard & Evans, 2001). In Canada, despite a fairly high rate of gun ownership, about one
quarter of the population, reflecting about 7 million firearms (less than the United States, but higher
than most Western European countries), guns have been more often presented as a public health

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International Criminal Justice Review 21(4)
Figure 1. Types of firearms used in homicides in Canada, 1976–2006.
Source: Li, 2007
issue for accidents and suicide, rather than for murder and other violent crime (Canadian Paediatric
Society, 2005; Gabor, Roberts, Stein, Di Giulio, 2001; Leonard, 1994). Gun ownership has been in
decline and tends to be higher in the Western provinces and Quebec (23%) and lowest in Ontario
(15%; Boyd, 2003; Coalition for Gun Control, 2001). Canada’s relatively strict federal gun control
laws have been credited with preventing or at least containing various types of firearms deaths,
including those among youth (Bridges, 2004; Cukier, 1998; Pan et al., 2007). Guns are not legally
available to those under 18 (with some exception for Aboriginal youth needing them for subsistence
hunting), automatic weapons were prohibited in 1977, handguns have been banned since 1994, cri-
teria for firearms acquisition certificates were expanded in 1991, and permissible firearms (rifles,
shotguns) for hunting and sports must be licensed and registered (Bottomley, 2004; Bridges,
2004).1 In general, over a period of more than two decades, murders committed with rifles and shot-
guns declined, but from about 1991 handguns surpassed long guns in homicide statistics prevalence
(see Figure 1). Thus, while in 2006 the gun homicide rate in Canada was about the same as it had
been 20 years previously, with about 30% killed by a firearm, a greater proportion of these were
perpetrated with handguns (Li, 2007). Gun use in relation to robbery declined sharply from a peak
of 36 per 100,000 in 1981 to 11 per 100,000 in 2007 (Li, 2007; see Figure 2). Moreover, in 2004,
69% of violent incidents recorded by police did not involve weapons at all, and only a minority of
those involved guns, with knives and other weapons being much more common (Gannon &
Mihorean, 2005). Specifically looking at youth violence, knives have outstripped guns as a choice
of weapons (CCJS, 2001; Fitzgerald, 2003; Taylor-Butts & Bressan, 2008). Nevertheless, concern
about gun crime has continued to garner public and media attention throughout the 2000s (Shep-
tycki, 2009). Much of this concern focuses on the...