Perceived Racism and Weapons Use in Latino High School Boys: A QuantCrit Secondary Analysis

Although school mass shooters are overwhelmingly White and male, Black and Latinx youth are exposed to gun violence in and out of schools at disproportionate rates compared to their White peers. Little is known about the impact that racism may have on Latino male youth’s orientation toward firearms and weapons use. We applied a QuantCrit framework to examine the relationship between perceived racism and weapons-related behavior among Latino adolescent boys, while also considering the effects of protective and risk factors. Using secondary data from the 2021 Adolescent and Behavior Experience Survey (ABES), we conducted two hierarchical logistic regression models to examine how perceived racism predicted the odds of carrying a gun and bringing a weapon to school. Racism significantly predicted carrying a gun anywhere but not bringing a weapon to school. When bullying and suicidal ideation were added to the model, racism was no longer a significant predictor. School belongingness was not a significant predictor of either gun carrying or bringing a weapon to school. The intertwined nature of discrimination, school bullying, and suicidality reveals the magnitude of risks to normative development faced by Latino adolescent boys. These findings call for additional research to further disentangle the role of promoting or inhibiting environments and for policies that emphasize rather than deny the importance of ethnic-racial identity work, anti-racism in schools, and critical consciousness in support of mental health. Finally, this study contributes to the nascent scholarship using QuantCrit to challenge dominant paradigms in quantitative research on and about communities of color.