Does target shooting make teenagers aggressive?

When the dust settles on the tragedy of the latest mass shooting, gun clubs usually see a spike in their memberships as people look to arm and defend themselves. At the same time, many others argue for greater gun controls, and from their perspective, recreational target shooting is very much part of the problem, not the answer.Anecdotally, this is borne out by the many killers who often turn out to have been target shooters. Indeed, in Germany after the teenage perpetrators of two spree atrocities, or their parents – in Erfurt in 2002 and in Winnenden in 2009 – were found to be shooting club members, the German Shooting Sport and Archery Federation decided to sponsor psychological research into the question of whether shooting club members are more aggressive than normal, and whether target shooting makes people more aggressive. Some of the initial findings have now been published in the journal Aggressive Behaviour and while the results are not conclusive, they do suggest there is reason to worry about the psychological effects of gun club membership.The initial study involved 45 teenage target shooters (average age 13 years; they'd been a member of their clubs for about a year) completing measures of their aggression three times every six months over the course of the research. For example, they rated their agreement with statements like "I would rather hit somebody than be a coward", and they took another test to reveal how readily they associated self-related words w...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Source Type: blogs