Is there an association between the opening of deer hunting season and shootings in rural counties in the United States?
The old proverb derived from the biblical book of Matthew, “Live by the sword, die by the sword” is predictive of our fraught relationship with guns and animals, particularly with wildlife.
A new study warns that throughout rural America, the increased presence of loaded and unlocked guns in homes and vehicles when deer hunting season opens is likely contributing to an increase in gun injuries and homicides.
“[M]ore people were killed by gunfire in the first week of deer hunting season than in any other week of the calendar year,” according to the lead author of the study, urban sociologist and criminologist Patrick Sharkey, who is the William S. Tod Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Professor Sharkey’s research focuses on urban inequality, violence, and public policy.
As part of this study, Professor Sharkey and collaborators factored out gun deaths linked to hunting accidents, which were exceedingly rare to begin with. Instead, they found that the availability of unlocked and loaded guns were linked to the greater risk for gun violence.
To test this idea, Professor Sharkey and collaborators examined and compared statistics collected between 2014–2021 on gun shootings occurring in 854 rural U.S. counties spread across 44 states (Figure 1). They found that the rate of firearm shootings that occurred in the first week following each county’s opening date for the annual deer hunting season jumped by an average of 49% compared to shootings the week before. Additionally, that rate was still 41% higher during the second week, but the rate increase of shootings fell to “close to zero” by the third week of deer hunting season.
Professor Sharkey and collaborators noted that the sharp rise and fall in shootings over the first three weeks of deer hunting season is not surprising because data show that, in Wisconsin, for example, “70% of annual deer harvested are killed in the first nine days of the season.”
Further, these shooting trends “were largely replicated when [rare] hunting accidents were removed from the analysis,” Professor Sharkey and collaborators wrote, suggesting that the bulk of shootings were person-on-person violence. They pointed out that the exact timing of deer hunting season, which varies from state to state and in some cases from county to county, is associated with a sharp change in shootings, providing additional evidence that this rise in gun violence is associated with increased availability of loaded and unlocked firearms due to the advent of deer hunting season instead of some other change occurring around the same time.
To bolster this finding, Professor Sharkey and collaborators stratified states by the number of hunting licenses per capita and found that shootings are more pronounced in states with a large hunting population. This is agrees with findings from a previous study of rural counties that found a 300% jump in arrests involving men with a shotgun as each deer hunting season began.
All of the evidence “leads us to conclude that the most plausible explanation for the increase in shootings in the week after the start of deer hunting season is the heightened presence of firearms in public and private spaces,” Professor Sharkey and collaborators wrote.
Despite the evidence, people are not doomed to murder each other during the first couple weeks of deer hunting season. For example, Professor Sharkey and collaborators think that “enhanced firearm regulations that govern firearm storage, carrying and purchasing, particularly in states where deer hunting is popular, may serve to reduce the number of shootings that occur at the onset of the hunting season.”
Source:
Patrick Sharkey, Juan Camilo Cristancho, and Daniel Semenza (2024). Deer Hunting Season and Firearm Violence in US Rural Counties, JAMA Network Open 7(8):e2427683 | doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.27683
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