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• Posted July 8, 2025

More Florida Teens Strapping Up, Study Says

More Florida teens are roaming the streets packing heat, a new study says.

Handgun carrying among Florida middle and high school students increased by 65% between 2002 and 2022, researchers reported July 7 in the journal Pediatrics.

Teenage girls, middle school students and white children contributed substantially to this increase, researchers said.

However, the study found that teenage boys and rural teens were most likely to carry guns around.

“These findings indicate the need to specifically tailor earlier prevention strategies focused on handgun access and carrying toward female and middle school students, with ongoing attention to rural and male adolescents across racial and ethnic identities, who still have the highest prevalence of carriage after a 20-year period,” concluded the research team led by Erin Wright-Kelly, director of research and evaluation at the University of Colorado Injury and Violence Prevention Center.

For the study, researchers analyzed data from an annual survey of Florida middle and high school students, involving more than 701,000 teens in all.

Results showed that about 6% of Florida teens reported carrying around guns in 2022, up from less than 4% in 2002.

Girls had three times the odds of carrying a gun in 2022 compared to 2002, while middle school students and white children had twice the odds, researchers said.

In fact, about 6.7% of middle school students reported carrying a gun in 2022, compared to 5.5% of high school students, results showed.

Rural teens were nearly twice as likely to carry guns as suburban or urban teens, 9.9% versus 5.4%.

But these firearms likely never entered school halls. The proportion of teens bringing guns to school declined by 60% between 2002 and 2022, researchers found.

This was accompanied by a 29% decline in the percentage of teens who thought favorably about carrying a handgun at school, researchers said.

More Florida teens also think it’s harder to get a gun, with a 27% decreased in teens’ perceived ease of handgun access, researchers noted.

They said future research should investigate whether school safety measures like metal detectors and security badges resulted in this decline.

“Research should also examine whether changes in firearm laws and media coverage of school shootings resulted in increased messaging about punitive penalties for school carrying,” the team added.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on gun carrying among youth.

SOURCES: Pediatrics, July 7, 2025; American Academy of Pediatrics, news release, July 7, 2025