The study found that conceptual inconsistencies in routine activities theory were illustrated by categorizing gang membership, gun carrying, and employment as both risk and protective factors in a high-poverty context. Bivariate analyses indicated that gang membership, gun carrying, and employment status were significant risk factors for violent victimization, but these effects were mediated by measures of lifestyles (e.g., demographic and family factors, deviant lifestyles) included as controls in the full multivariate model. The strong positive relationship between gang membership and gun carrying found in previous studies may be due to model misspecification and/or the lack of research on high-poverty samples of inner-city youth from the deep South. Additional logistic regression analyses also indicated that the number of hours employed per week (but not employment status) was a risk factor for violent victimization. The theoretical implications of these findings for routine activities theory are discussed, such as the impact of employment on victimization risk findings, and the suggestion that offending and victimization are closely related. Two waves of longitudinal data from a high-poverty sample of African-American youth were used to examine the determinants of victimization risk. Data were collected in 2000 and 2001 as part of an ongoing study of adolescent risk behavior called the Mobile Youth Survey, which included youths from age 9 to 19 in 12 high poverty neighborhoods in Mobile, AL. Tables, and references