St. Louis ranks high for gun fatalities among youths (3 times+ national average)

"Adolescent ownership and use of firearms is a growing concern, and results
from the Rochester study suggest the concern is well founded.

By the ninth and tenth grades, more boys own illegal guns (7 percent) than own legal guns (3 percent). Of the boys who own illegal guns, about half of the whites and African-Americans and nearly 90 percent of the Hispanics carry them on a regular basis.

Figure 13 shows a very strong relationship between owning illegal guns and
delinquency and drug use.

Seventy-four percent of the illegal gunowners commit street crimes, 24 percent commit gun crimes, and 41 percent use drugs.

Boys who own legal firearms, however, have much lower rates of delinquency and drug use and are even slightly less delinquent than none-owners of guns.

The socialization into gun ownership is also vastly different for legal and illegal gunowners. Those who own legal guns have fathers who own guns for sport and hunting.

On the other hand, those who own illegal guns have friends who own llegal guns and are far more likely to be gang members.

For legal gunowners,socialization appears to take place in the family; for illegal gunowners, it appears to take place 'on the street.'"

"We worked on a gun violence project with PERF in one of the most violent areas of St. Louis, a neighborhood called Wells-Goodfellow. Like many of the other chiefs have said, the victims had rap sheets just as long as the suspects’.

One thing we have to be aware of to give context to this whole problem is that we are looking at an urban problem. It’s much less a suburban or rural problem. It really affects young minorities — Hispanic and black males. I think that the suspects devalue life, the victims devalue life, and the system also devalues life.

When you look at the shooting victims and suspects in these neighborhoods, you see 20 or 30 felony arrests, with eight convictions. Often the convictions don’t result in any jail time at all; they’re getting probation on top of probation. This has caused a lot of us in cities to move
toward federal prosecution, because we know on the state level it’s a hit-and-miss prospect: they’re arrested, they’re convicted, and they come out multiple times.

In Missouri, there’s a type of probation people can receive, and it has made it very difficult for us to establish a person as a convicted felon. I’ve heard other chiefs talking about the fact that a weapons charge in their state is only a misdemeanor offense. But in St. Louis, a weapons violation can turn out to be no offense at all. An individual will get arrested for a weapons charge, which is a felony, and often they plead to that case and get an SIS—a suspended imposition of sentence. It means that if you serve out your probation, which everybody does, that conviction is erased. So if you’re arrested again with another weapon, you don’t have a conviction on your record, so you’re not a felon in possession of a weapon. If you continue to get multiple SISs, you never become a convicted felon. These offenders will often show up for other crimes, and if they never have a conviction, then you’re never able to put stiffer charges on them."