MONDAY, Aug. 19, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- Across rural America, the increased presence of loaded guns in homes and vehicles could lead to a spike in gun injuries and homicides at the start of every deer hunting season, a new study warns. In fact, in the U.
S. rural counties covered by the study, "more people were killed by gunfire in the first week of deer hunting season than in any other week of the calendar year," said a team led by Patrick Sharkey , a professor of sociology at Princeton University in New Jersey. The finding held even after his team factored out gun deaths linked to hunting accidents, which they noted are exceedingly rare.
The study was published Aug. 14 in the journal JAMA Network Open . As Sharkey and colleagues noted, across the board the sheer availability of guns -- especially when unlocked and loaded -- has long been tied to greater risks for gun violence.
The researchers suspected that the annual opening of deer hunting season was a perfect moment to test this theory, as guns are brought out of storage by millions of hunters across the United States. The study tracked 2014-2021 statistics on gun shootings occurring in 854 rural U.S.
counties spread across 44 states. Researchers calculated the rate of shootings during the week prior to each counties' opening date for the annual deer hunting season, and compared those numbers to shootings occurring during the first three weeks of the hunting season. The result: Firearm shootings that injured or killed c.