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 with words pertaining to violence and aggression – this supposedly providing an implicit or non-conscious measure of the aggressiveness of their self concept. They also answered questions about their emotional regulation abilities – for example, whether they deal with emotional problems by seeking help or through anger or aggression.

Although there was no control group – the research sponsors didn't want to spread negative publicity among non-shooters – the aggression questionnaires used in the study have previously been throughly tested by psychologists on the general public, thus giving an idea of a "normal" level of aggression. The results showed that the teen shooting club members were significantly above average in their self-rated aggressive tendencies, and that this rose through the course of the study, so that by the end, they averaged a level of aggression higher than 84 per cent of the general population (in contrast, results on the implicit test suggested they associated their self concept more strongly with peace than aggression, but without a control group it's difficult to interpret this finding. The teenage shooters also scored highly for maladaptive emotion regulation strategies, especially anger.

A second study involved teenage shooting club members and teenage basketball players spending around 40 minutes on target practice – four rounds of ten shots, either firing a gun at a target or throwing a ball at a basket, respectively. Before and after the training they all completed what's known as a "Lexical Decision Task". This involves looking at strings of letters and deciding if they're real words or not. In this case, the researchers were particularly interested to how quick the participants were to recognise words pertaining to aggression and anxiety – greater speed at recognising words with these connotations after the training would be taken as a sign that aggression and anxiety had become more salient in the participants' minds. The results were clear – for the shooting club members, but not the basketball players, training specifically increased the salience of aggressive and anxiety-related concepts.

The researchers cautioned that their results to not show there is a causal link between shooting club membership and acts of aggression – after all, they did not take any measures of actual aggressive behavior. Nonetheless, they said that the German Shooting Federation (and other shooting federations) "should feel strongly encouraged to counteract aggressive tendencies of their members based on the present results".

Further reading

Erle, T., Barth, N., Kälke, F., Duttler, G., Lange, H., Petko, A., & Topolinski, S. (2016). Are target-shooters more aggressive than the general population? Aggressive Behavior DOI: 10.1002/ab.21657