The Psychology Behind Gun Violence in Harrisburg, PA: When Wounds Become Weapons

Written by: Dr. Taylor Bryant  | Forensic Psychology Expert & Consultant

In my years working at the intersection of criminal behavior, trauma, and public health, I have sat across from many individuals whose relationship with firearms began long before they ever held one. It began in the homes where they grew up in, the shouting behind closed doors, the fists raised in kitchens, the silence that followed, and the helplessness that never quite left. The gun, for many of these individuals, was not a weapon first. It was a solution. Understanding the surge of gun violence in communities like Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and across the United States requires us to look beyond the barrel of the gun and into the earliest chapters of people's lives.

The Numbers We Cannot Ignore

The scale of gun violence in America is staggering. In 2021, the nation reached a near three-decade high in firearm-related deaths, driven by surges in both homicides and suicides. In 2022, more than 48,000 Americans died from firearm-related injuries equating to roughly 132 people every single day.  In 2023, that toll was 46,728 lives; the third-highest ever recorded. By 2024, the figure dropped to 44,447 deaths, a welcome 7% decline and the largest single-year reduction since 1995. Yet even with that progress, gun deaths remain higher than pre-pandemic 2019 levels, and suicide by firearm reached its highest percentage on record accounting for 57% of all suicides in 2024.

Children are not spared. Firearms remain the leading cause of death among Americans ages 1 through 19. In 2023 alone, 2,566 children and teenagers lost their lives to gun violence.

Here in Pennsylvania, approximately 1,600 residents die from gun violence every year, with an additional 3,000 injured. In 2023, the state recorded 1,807 firearm-related deaths. The racial disparity is severe: Black Pennsylvanians are 22 times more likely to die by gun homicide than their white counterparts.

Harrisburg tells its own painful story. In 2021, the city ranked 8th in the nation for murders per capita according to FBI data, a jarring statistic for a state capital of roughly 50,000 residents. Homicides climbed to 22 in 2022, fell to 14 in 2023, then surged again to 22 in 2024 with a majority of victims being young Black men between the ages of 16 and 20. Five of those 2024 killings were confirmed gang-related, the highest since 1987. In 2025, concerted intervention efforts helped bring the number down to 14 which reflects a 36% reduction, though four of those victims were still teenagers.

Each number is a name. Each name was once a child.

What the Research Tells Us About Trauma and the Gun

The link between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and later violence involvement is one of the most robust findings in all of behavioral science. But the forensic psychology research is increasingly specific: it is not just violence in general that childhood trauma predicts, it is gun violence in particular.

A landmark study published in Psychological Trauma (Wamser-Nanney et al., 2019) examined gun violence victims hospitalized for injuries and found that those exposed to domestic violence and community violence as children were three times more likely to own and carry a gun and significantly more likely to be arrested for gun-related offenses. The message is clear: childhood traumatic events, particularly domestic violence exposure and community violence, function as critical antecedent risk factors for gun violence involvement.

Why? The mechanisms are rooted in developmental neuroscience and attachment theory. When a child grows up in a home where violence is the primary language of conflict resolution, several things happen simultaneously:

• The nervous system recalibrates for threat: Chronic stress from witnessing domestic violence rewires the developing brain's threat-detection systems. The amygdala, the brain's alarm center, becomes hypervigilant. The prefrontal cortex, responsible for impulse control and long-term reasoning, develops under the shadow of that constant activation. The result is an adult who reads ambiguous social situations as dangerous and responds before the rational mind can intervene.

• Identity and safety become fused with power: Children who feel powerless, who watch a parent be beaten, who hide under beds, who learn that love and violence coexist, often grow up seeking external symbols of power and protection. A firearm, in many communities, has become the most immediate available proxy for safety, status, and control. It does not fill the void left by trauma; it simply covers it.

• The "cycle of violence" becomes cultural: The well-established intergenerational transmission of violence means that households where domestic violence occurs are statistically more likely to produce children who perpetrate interpersonal violence as adults. This is not destiny, rather, it is a pattern that intervention can interrupt. But without that intervention, the cycle compounds.

• Neighborhoods with high concentrations of trauma become communities where carrying a firearm is normalized, even rational, given the perceived threat environment. Unresolved grief masquerades as aggression: Many of the individuals I have assessed after violent offenses describe something that clinical literature recognizes as "traumatic grief", the complicated mourning of safety, trust, and childhood that was stolen from them. Untreated, that grief frequently presents as externalized rage. In communities flooded with firearms, that rage has a lethal outlet.

What We See in Our Communities

Harrisburg and communities like it have become case studies in what happens when poverty, historical disinvestment, untreated trauma, and illegal firearms converge. The city's gang-related homicides are not simply criminal activity, they are, in significant part, trauma-organized behavior. Young men who grew up watching violence in their homes carry those scripts into their streets. Retaliatory shootings follow the logic of a traumatized nervous system: perceived disrespect equals existential threat, and existential threats require immediate, decisive responses.

CeaseFirePA has documented that one-third of guns used in a crime are claimed by their owners to have been lost or stolen firearms that enter the community because Pennsylvania does not legally require reporting of missing weapons. When illegal firearms are abundant and trauma is unaddressed, the gap between a moment of rage and a fatal outcome narrows to seconds.

Statewide, gun violence declined 37% between 2022 and 2024. Harrisburg's numbers moved against that trend in 2024 before improving in 2025.  This suggests that community-specific factors, including concentrated intergenerational trauma and gang-related feuds, require localized solutions beyond statewide policy shifts.

The Path Forward: Treating the Wound, Not Just the Weapon

As a forensic psychology expert and consultant, I am frequently asked whether mental illness explains gun violence. The evidence is clear: serious mental illness accounts for a small fraction of gun homicides. What does predict gun violence far more reliably is trauma history, specifically childhood exposure to domestic violence and community violence.

This has profound implications for how we approach prevention. It means that gun violence intervention cannot succeed without trauma-informed or trauma-focused care infrastructure. It means that domestic violence services are gun violence prevention services. It means that early childhood programs in high-risk communities are, at their core, public safety investments.