ObjectivesThis study examines the effect of crime‐specific fears (worry about crime and perceived risk of crime), violent victimization, and diffuse anxieties (belief in a dangerous world [BDW], general distrust, and belief in others’ violent intentions) on protective gun ownership and involvement in “active” gun behaviors (i.e., gun accessibility in the home and handgun carrying).MethodsWe use data on over 4,000 U.S. adults from the 2017 nationally representative Pew Research Center's American Trends Panel.ResultsFear of crime and perceived risks are largely unrelated to gun ownership, yet violent victimization influences protective ownership, which in turn influences gun accessibility. Additionally, diffuse fears and anxieties also matter for protective ownership and accessibility, with some effects explained by political party affiliation. Broader, general distrust of others is associated with owners’ frequency of carrying their handgun outside of the home.ConclusionThe results highlight the complexity of the fear‐guns link, with multiple dimensions of fear and experience at work.

The existing research on risk factors for adolescent substance use highlights the importance of peers' direct influence on risky behaviors, yet two key limitations persist. First, there is considerably less attention to the ways in which peers shape overall (e.g., school-level) normative climates of attitudes and expectations about substance use, and, second, the role of the broader geographic contexts in which these climates are embedded is essentially neglected. In light of shifting trends in geographic differences in adolescent substance use, the current study uses data from the 2007 Nebraska Risk and Protective Factor Student Survey (n = 26,647; 80 % non-Hispanic White; 51 % female) to (a) explore whether geographic context shapes the character (permissiveness) and consistency (homogeneity) of normative climates and (b) examine the consequences (effects) of such climates on adolescent substance use risk across the rural-urban continuum. Normative climates are a consistent predictor of substance use, yet the geographic context in which schools are located matters for both the nature and influence of these climates, and the patterns differ between normative climates about alcohol and marijuana. These findings illustrate that school normative climates do indeed matter for substance use behavior, and the ways in which they do depend on their broader, geographic context. Thus, future research on youth's substance use should be attuned to these more nuanced distinctions.

Understanding the short- and long-term transmission dynamics of blood-borne illnesses in network contexts represents an important public health priority for people who inject drugs and the general population that surrounds them. The purpose of this article is to compare the risk networks of urban and rural people who inject drugs in Puerto Rico. In the current study, network characteristics are drawn from the sampling "trees" used to recruit participants to the study. We found that injection frequency is the only factor significantly related to clustering behavior among both urban and rural people who inject drugs.

The findings suggest ways in which PWID risk clusters can be identified for targeted interventions.

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