Researchers at Rutgers University have found that adverse childhood experiences can make people more sensitive to potential threats from others, which in turn increases their risk of engaging in defensive gun use in adulthood.

Their study, published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, used cross-sectional data from a subsample of 3,130 adults with firearm access drawn from a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults.

Those surveyed were asked about their childhood experiences with abuse and neglect, their levels of social distrust and sensitivity to perceived threats, depressive symptoms and their self-reported use of a gun for self-defense.

The authors first assessed the association between adverse childhood experiences and adulthood defensive gun use. They then evaluated the role of depressive symptoms and threat sensitivity in that relationship.

“Research that links risk factors from childhood to problems later in life often neglects the role that situational and cognitive factors might play,” said Sultan Altikriti, a postdoctoral fellow at the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center and lead author of the study. “We tried to unpack the cognitive factors through which experiences from childhood affect behavior in adulthood.”

The findings showed that adverse childhood experiences increased adulthood levels of threat sensitivity and depression. However, only threat sensitivity was associated with defensive gun use. Further analyses suggested evidence that threat sensitivity accounts for some of the increased risk of defensive gun use among those with adverse childhood experiences.

“Sensitivity to threats from others and hypervigilance can cause people to see threats where they do not exist,” said Altikriti. “This sense of threat sensitivity can then lead to overreactions in neutral or ambiguous situations, which might lead to unnecessary gun use.”

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Reducing adverse childhood experiences not only reduces the immediate harm and psychological impact but can reduce the cumulative harm throughout someone’s life, the researchers said. They added that because adverse childhood experiences are fixed in childhood and adolescence, interventions that interrupt the downstream mechanisms could be more feasible in dealing with the impact of these experiences on negative life outcomes.

The study’s coauthors include Daniel C. Semenza, director of Interpersonal Violence Research at the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at the Rutgers School of Public Health; Michael D. Anestis, executive director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at Rutgers; Alexander Testa, an assistant professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston; Dylan B. Jackson, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

IMAGE CREDIT: Thang Cao.