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Rutgers researchers link adverse childhood experiences and firearm use in later life
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Freya Lucas
Jan 27, 2025
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Researchers at Rutgers University have found that adverse childhood experiences can make people more sensitive to potential threats from others, which in turn increases their risk of engaging in defensive gun use in adulthood.
The study, published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, used cross-sectional data from a subsample of 3,130 adults with firearm access drawn from a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults.Those surveyed were asked about their childhood experiences with abuse and neglect, their levels of social distrust and sensitivity to perceived threats, depressive symptoms and their self-reported use of a gun for self-defense.
Researchers first examined the association between adverse childhood experiences and adulthood defensive gun use, before evaluating the role of depressive symptoms and threat sensitivity in that relationship.
“Research that links risk factors from childhood to problems later in life often neglects the role that situational and cognitive factors might play,” lead author Sultan Altikriti said.
“We tried to unpack the cognitive factors through which experiences from childhood affect behaviour in adulthood.”
Ultimately the researchers concluded that adverse childhood experiences increased adulthood levels of threat sensitivity and depression, however only threat sensitivity was associated with defensive gun use. Further analyses suggested evidence that threat sensitivity accounts for some of the increased risk of defensive gun use among those with adverse childhood experiences.
“Sensitivity to threats from others and hypervigilance can cause people to see threats where they do not exist,” Mr Altikriti said. “This sense of threat sensitivity can then lead to overreactions in neutral or ambiguous situations, which might lead to unnecessary gun use.”
Because adverse childhood experiences are fixed in childhood and adolescence, interventions that interrupt the downstream mechanisms could be more feasible in dealing with the impact of these experiences on negative life outcomes, the research team argued.
Coauthors on the paper include Daniel C. Semenza; Michael D. Anestis; Alexander Testa; and Associate Professor Dylan B. Jackson.
Read the paper here.
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