Young Men, Small Arms, Unfinished Business

Fresh out of the printhouse and still smoking (sorry, really bad joke) the annual Small Arms Survey is here. The survey firmly establish what some of you didn't know/already suspected/already knew (depending on where in the world that you live): young men really loooove guns.

Did you know that:

• Young men represent a disproportionately high share of the perpetrators and victims of gun-related, lethal violence.
• Boys are two to three times more likely than girls to get involved in fighting.
• Young men—those aged 15 to 29—account for half of the world’s firearm homicide victims, or 70,000 to 100,000 deaths
annually.
• Curbing young men’s access to firearms has proved an effective component of short-term strategies to reduce the number of
deaths arising from youth violence.
• Countering socially constructed associations between guns, violence, power, and masculinity is a key component of any effective,
long-term violence prevention strategy.
• Men suffer more than 90 per cent of all gun deaths in Colombia. More than one-third of all firearm deaths are concentrated
among men aged 20–29, with more than 342,000 years of productive life lost from firearm deaths since 1979.