The Role of Firearms in Violence Scripts : The Dynamics of Gun Events among Adolescent Males

In recent years, the use and deadly consequences of gun violence among adolescents has reached epidemic proportions. At a time when national homicide rates are declining, the increasing rates of firearm deaths among teenagers is especially alarming. Deaths of adolescents due to firearm injuries are disproportionately concentrated among nonwhites, and especially among African-American teenagers and young adults. Only in times of civil war have there been higher within-group homicide rates in the United States. There appears to be a process of self-annihilation among male African-American teens in inner cities that is unprecedented in American history. Unfortunately, few studies have examined these sharp increases in gun fatalities among young males. This article attempts to contribute to the scant literature by examining the role of firearms in violent events among adolescent males. First, using an event-based approach, it suggests a framework for explaining interactions that involve adolescents and firearms. Events are analyzed as situated transactions, including rules that develop within specific contexts, the situations where weapons are used, the motivations for carrying and using weapons, and the personality sets of groups where weapons are used. There are rules that govern how disputes are settled, when and where firearms are used, and the significance of firearms within a broader adolescent culture. This approach does not deny the importance of the individual attributes that bring people to situations, but it recognizes that once in the situation, other processes shape the outcomes of these events

Inclusive Scholarship: Extension Program Participants as Poster Coauthors

The poster is a promising mechanism for inclusive scholarship. Inclusive scholarship provides direct opportunities for inclusion and representation. Community partner and youth participants in an urban gardening program were engaged in program-related scholarship via involvement in creation of a poster and its presentation at a community engagement conference. This article explains how including partners and youths as coauthors and copresenters helped Extension professionals reach a wider audience while deepening relationships, empowering youth participants, and improving data quality

Guns, Youth Violence, and Social Identity in Inner Cities

While youth violence has always been a critical part of delinquency, the modern epidemic is marked by high rates of gun violence. Adolescents in cities possess and carry guns on a large scale, guns are often at the scene of youth violence, and guns often are used. Guns play a central role in initiating, sustaining, and elevating the epidemic of youth violence. The demand for guns among youth was fueled by an "ecology of danger," comprising street gangs, expanding drug markets with high intrinsic levels of violence, high rates of adult violence and fatalities, and cultural styles of gun possession and carrying. Guns became symbols of respect, power, identity, and manhood to a generation of youth, in addition to having strategic value for survival. The relationship between guns and youth violence is complex. The effects of guns are mediated by structural factors that increase the youth demand for guns, the available supply, and culture and scripts which teach kids lethal ways to use guns

Impactful Engagement: Successful Strategies for Working with Urban Teens

Adolescence is often described as one of the most difficult periods in the life course. The pre-teen and teen years play a critical role in shaping pathways to adulthood. High-quality educational experiences have been shown to increase the likelihood of future workplace success. There is a well-document disparity in educational quality between urban, suburban, and rural public schools. Across America, school- and community-based programs attempt to augment the impact secondary education on young people by creating new opportunities for exploring interests, skills acquisition, and increasing social capital. Extra-school programs aim to bridge the gap to boost student achievement and expand horizons for successful adolescent development. In many urban neighborhoods, there is a dearth of options for families who search for opportunities for their adolescents. Urban GEMS (Gardening Entrepreneurs Motivating Sustainability) is a positive youth development program that uses gardening to improve outcomes for urban youth participants. The Urban GEMS program was designed to address the well-documented link between food insecurity and school failure at a neighborhood level. Addressing both the educational and nutritional (basic needs) of young people growing up in economically challenged environments requires new thinking. Urban GEMS features project-based learning and youth leadership opportunities, which include tackling real and significant challenges facing the African American community. This ignite session will provide highlights of engagement strategies, effective lesson plans, effective event highlights, and preliminary outcome data associated with participation in Urban GEMS. One key to success has been employing credible educators drawn from the local communities to help develop and then teach the curriculum. Another successful approach included providing a welcoming youth-friendly program space in which urban youth were encouraged to feel like the space was partially theirs. In a short amount of time, our team created a brand "OSU Urban GEMS" and spread awareness of our mission to reach our goals. The curriculum takes a holistic approach to integrating the principles of positive youth development and youth empowerment, while also remaining grounded in the social conditions in the neighborhoods we serve. Community partnerships and involvement in all aspects of Urban GEMS keep us hopeful that it will become sustainable beyond the initial grant funding. The program evaluation data help us to understand what impact our efforts are having on the youth and their families and make adjustments for lessons that are not successful.AUTHOR AFFILIATION: Deanna Wilkinson, associate professor, Ohio State Department of Human SciencesUrban GEMS (Gardening Entrepreneurs Motivating Sustainability) is a positive youth development program that uses gardening to improve outcomes for urban youth participants. The Urban GEMS program was designed to address the well-documented link between food insecurity and school failure at a neighborhood level. Addressing both the educational and nutritional (basic needs) of young people growing up in economically-challenged environments requires new thinking. Urban GEMS features project-based learning and youth leadership opportunities, which include tackling real and significant challenges facing the African American community. This ignite session will provide highlights of engagement strategies, effective lesson plans, effective event highlights, and preliminary outcome data associated with participation in Urban GEMS

Social Contagion of Violence

Since 1968, violence and other crimes in New York City have followed a pattern of recurring epidemics. There have been three consecutive and contiguous cycles characterized by sharp increases in homicides and assaults to an elevated rate followed by equally steep declines to levels near the previous starting point. The most recent epidemic, from 1985-96, had the sharpest rise and steepest decline of the three epidemics. Popular explanations of the current epidemic fail to account for both the rise and fall of the decline, or for the repetitive pattern of these epidemics. In this article, we use public health data to identify factors associated with the cyclical rise and fall of homicides and non-lethal injury violence in this most recent of the three epidemics. Homicides in this period were concentrated among minority males, ages 15-24, while victimization rates for females of all ages remained stable. Gun homicides and non-lethal gun assaults accounted for all the increase and decline in interpersonal violence from 1985-95; intentional injuries caused by other means also were stable or declining over this period. Next, we use hierarchical linear regression models, with a rich set of time-varying covariates and controls for both temporal and spatial autocorrelation, to identify whether the rise and fall of homicide are explained by processes of diffusion across adjacent neighborhoods. We estimate the probabilities of homicides and assaults in a neighborhood controlling for rates of homicide or assault in the surrounding neighborhoods in the preceding year, and find that gun violence diffuses across neighborhoods over time. Epidemic patterns of violence disproportionately affected African Americans as victims of gun violence, both homicides and non-lethal gun assaults. Diffusion was strongest in neighborhoods where social control was compromised by extreme poverty and concentrated racial segregation. Concentrations of immigrant households in neighborhoods were a protective factor in suppressing the violence epidemic. We then use social contagion theories to link contagion of violence across neighborhoods to individual data on social interactions that may animate the transmission and diffusion of violence. Analyses of the social contexts and interpersonal dynamics of violent events reveals how street interactions in interpersonal disputes link individuals within and across social networks in a competition for status that is skewed by the presence of firearms. Decisions to carry, show and use weapons are based on perceptions of threat and danger, which are shaped by the presence of firearms and the potential stigma associated with non-action. These events occur across multiple contexts - bars, streetcorners, drug markets - to reinforce perceptions of risk and expectations of the threat or reality of lethal violence

Strengthening Families Through a Re-envisioned Approach to Fatherhood Education

Fatherhood education has the potential to affect not only fathers\u27 nurturant behaviors but also multiple dimensions of family life. The weGrill program blends fatherhood, youth development, and nutrition education, with food grilling as the focal activity. Grounded in multiple learning theories, the program helps fathers and their adolescent children learn broadly about family life topics, planning for the future, and nutrition and healthful food behaviors. The program represents a re-envisioned approach to fatherhood education

Animals can assign novel odours to a known category

The ability to identify a novel stimulus as a member of a known category allows an organism torespond appropriately towards it. Categorisation is thus a fundamental component of cognition andan essential tool for processing and responding to unknown stimuli. Therefore, one might expectto observe it throughout the animal kingdom and across sensory domains. There is much evidenceof visual categorisation in non-human animals, but we currently know little about this process inother modalities. In this experiment, we investigated categorisation in the olfactory domain. Dogswere trained to discriminate between 40 odours; the presence or absence of accelerants formed thecategorical rule. Those in the experimental group were rewarded for responding to substrates withaccelerants (either burnt or un-burnt) and inhibit responses to the same substrates (either burnt or unburnt)without accelerants (S+ counterbalanced). The pseudocategory control group was trained onthe same stimuli without the categorical rule. The experimental group learned the discrimination andanimals were able to generalise to novel stimuli from the same category. None of the control animalswere able to learn the discrimination within the maximum number of trials. This study provides the firstevidence that non-human animals can learn to categorise non-biologically relevant odour information

Effect of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor and angiotensin receptor blocker initiation on organ support-free days in patients hospitalized with COVID-19

IMPORTANCE Overactivation of the renin-angiotensin system (RAS) may contribute to poor clinical outcomes in patients with COVID-19. Objective To determine whether angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor or angiotensin receptor blocker (ARB) initiation improves outcomes in patients hospitalized for COVID-19. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS In an ongoing, adaptive platform randomized clinical trial, 721 critically ill and 58 non–critically ill hospitalized adults were randomized to receive an RAS inhibitor or control between March 16, 2021, and February 25, 2022, at 69 sites in 7 countries (final follow-up on June 1, 2022). INTERVENTIONS Patients were randomized to receive open-label initiation of an ACE inhibitor (n = 257), ARB (n = 248), ARB in combination with DMX-200 (a chemokine receptor-2 inhibitor; n = 10), or no RAS inhibitor (control; n = 264) for up to 10 days. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES The primary outcome was organ support–free days, a composite of hospital survival and days alive without cardiovascular or respiratory organ support through 21 days. The primary analysis was a bayesian cumulative logistic model. Odds ratios (ORs) greater than 1 represent improved outcomes. RESULTS On February 25, 2022, enrollment was discontinued due to safety concerns. Among 679 critically ill patients with available primary outcome data, the median age was 56 years and 239 participants (35.2%) were women. Median (IQR) organ support–free days among critically ill patients was 10 (–1 to 16) in the ACE inhibitor group (n = 231), 8 (–1 to 17) in the ARB group (n = 217), and 12 (0 to 17) in the control group (n = 231) (median adjusted odds ratios of 0.77 [95% bayesian credible interval, 0.58-1.06] for improvement for ACE inhibitor and 0.76 [95% credible interval, 0.56-1.05] for ARB compared with control). The posterior probabilities that ACE inhibitors and ARBs worsened organ support–free days compared with control were 94.9% and 95.4%, respectively. Hospital survival occurred in 166 of 231 critically ill participants (71.9%) in the ACE inhibitor group, 152 of 217 (70.0%) in the ARB group, and 182 of 231 (78.8%) in the control group (posterior probabilities that ACE inhibitor and ARB worsened hospital survival compared with control were 95.3% and 98.1%, respectively). CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE In this trial, among critically ill adults with COVID-19, initiation of an ACE inhibitor or ARB did not improve, and likely worsened, clinical outcomes. TRIAL REGISTRATION ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT0273570

Social Contagion of Violence

Since 1968, violence and other crimes in New York City have followed a pattern of recurring epidemics. There have been three consecutive and contiguous cycles characterized by sharp increases in homicides and assaults to an elevated rate followed by equally steep declines to levels near the previous starting point. The most recent epidemic, from 1985-96, had the sharpest rise and steepest decline of the three epidemics. Popular explanations of the current epidemic fail to account for both the rise and fall of the decline, or for the repetitive pattern of these epidemics. In this article, we use public health data to identify factors associated with the cyclical rise and fall of homicides and non-lethal injury violence in this most recent of the three epidemics. Homicides in this period were concentrated among minority males, ages 15-24, while victimization rates for females of all ages remained stable. Gun homicides and non-lethal gun assaults accounted for all the increase and decline in interpersonal violence from 1985-95; intentional injuries caused by other means also were stable or declining over this period. Next, we use hierarchical linear regression models, with a rich set of time-varying covariates and controls for both temporal and spatial autocorrelation, to identify whether the rise and fall of homicide are explained by processes of diffusion across adjacent neighborhoods. We estimate the probabilities of homicides and assaults in a neighborhood controlling for rates of homicide or assault in the surrounding neighborhoods in the preceding year, and find that gun violence diffuses across neighborhoods over time. Epidemic patterns of violence disproportionately affected African Americans as victims of gun violence, both homicides and non-lethal gun assaults. Diffusion was strongest in neighborhoods where social control was compromised by extreme poverty and concentrated racial segregation. Concentrations of immigrant households in neighborhoods were a protective factor in suppressing the violence epidemic. We then use social contagion theories to link contagion of violence across neighborhoods to individual data on social interactions that may animate the transmission and diffusion of violence. Analyses of the social contexts and interpersonal dynamics of violent events reveals how street interactions in interpersonal disputes link individuals within and across social networks in a competition for status that is skewed by the presence of firearms. Decisions to carry, show and use weapons are based on perceptions of threat and danger, which are shaped by the presence of firearms and the potential stigma associated with non-action. These events occur across multiple contexts - bars, streetcorners, drug markets - to reinforce perceptions of risk and expectations of the threat or reality of lethal violence