Abstract
As Tim described the acquisition of his first gun, it simply came into his hands at the appropriate time in his life—when he started getting “into the streets,” being active in a gang, and selling drugs. At the same time, he suggested that his own, almost organic, experience of getting a gun could be generalized to that of other similarly situated young men.
When I started gettin’ into the streets, I started gangbangin’, I started hustlin’ and things, and then, eventually, it just come. It’s not like a specific time when you decide it come, you just come across it, like one of your homies give you one, your friends give you one, you find one, or you get you a connect that sell guns and you just buy it.
—Tim
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Arlie Hochschild (1983) conceptualizes emotions, including fear, as being constituted of both interactionist and biological elements and argues that emotion has a “signal” function, warning “us of where we stand vis-à-vis outer or inner events.” As such, “what does and does not stand out as a ‘signal’ presupposes certain culturally taken-for-granted ways of seeing and holding expectations about the world.” Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California, 1983), 28. Her observation echoes Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1970) figure/background schema, which notes that the perceived is shaped by its context (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 11) because “the perceptual ‘something’ is always in the middle of something else, it is always part of a ‘field’” (ibid., 4).
See Deanna Wilkinson and Jeffrey Fagan, “A Theory of Violent Events,” in The Process and Structure of Crime, edited by Robert F. Meier, Leslie W. Kennedy, and Vincent F. Sacco, vol. 9, 169–95 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2001), 179–80.
Sheldon Glueck and Eleanor Glueck, Delinquents in the Making: Paths to Prevention (New York: Harper and Row, 1952).
Jan Kornelis Dijkstra et al., “Influence and Selection Processes in Weapon Carrying during Adolescence: The Roles of Status, Aggression, and Vulnerability,” Criminology 48, no. 1 (2010): 187–220.
Following Lee N. Robins, Deviant Children Grown Up (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1966), Sampson and Laub (1993) argue that the insignificant influence of delinquent siblings, relative to other factors, suggests that adolescents tend to select friends who are similar to themselves in behavior and attitudes (Sampson and Laub, Crime in the Making, 116–17). They also cite the difficulty of interpreting temporal ordering in searching for the effect of peers on delinquency since, as Farrington noted, most delinquent acts are committed in groups and “those who commit such acts will almost inevitably have delinquent friends” (ibid., 104). Likewise, self-report measurements of offending and delinquent peers, as Gottfredson and Hirschi point out, “may, almost by definition, be measuring the same underlying theoretical construct of delinquent peers” (ibid., 104).
Nancy Lesko, “Denaturalizing Adolescence: The Politics of Contemporary Representations,” Youth and Society 28, no. 2 (1996): 152.
Daniel W. Webster, Patricia S. Gainer, and Howard R. Champion, “Weapon Carrying among Inner-City Junior High School Students: Defensive Behavior vs. Aggressive Delinquency,” American Journal of Public Health 83, no. 11 (1993): 1607.
Philip J. Cook et al., “Underground Gun Markets,” Economic Journal 117 (November 2007): 597.
William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 7–8.
Alfred Blumstein, Frederick Rivara, and Richard Rosenfield, “The Rise and Decline of Homicide—and Why,” Annual Review of Public Health 21, no. 1 (2000): 529; see also Colin Loftin, “Assaultive Violence as a Contagious Social Process,” New York Academy of Medicine 62, no. 5 (1986).
Joseph F. Sheley and James D. Wright, “Motivations for Gun Possession and Carrying among Serious Juvenile Offenders,” Behavioral Sciences and the Law 11 (1993): 382.
Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Chicago: Alding, 1968), 61.
Copyright information
© 2015 Diane Marano
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Marano, D. (2015). Consuming Guns. In: Juvenile Offenders and Guns. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520142_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520142_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-56454-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-52014-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social Sciences CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)