Wonkblog More police officers die on the job in states with more guns

[jpak]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/08/more-police-officers-die-on-the-job-in-states-with-more-guns/

Five police officers were killed and seven others were wounded this week by sniper fire in Dallas, in what has become the deadliest day for the nation's law enforcement officers since 9/11.

Texas has long had a strong gun culture, with the state's gun laws among the country's least restrictive according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. But late last year, researchers at Harvard and elsewhere discovered an alarming fact: Police officers are much more likely to be killed in the line of duty in states with high rates of gun ownership.

The study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, used FBI data to track police officer deaths in the line of duty from 1996 to 2010. They cross-referenced this with state-level gun ownership rates as measured in a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey that asked about gun ownership from 2001 to 2004. To isolate, as accurately as possible, the effects of gun ownership on police officer homicides, they corrected for a number of factors that could also affect police officer homicide rates: overall rates of violent and property crime, the racial and economic demographics of the different states, income, education, alcohol consumption and rural/urban population breakdowns.

They then compared officer fatality rates in the eight states with the lowest public gun ownership rate (13.5 percent, on average) against officer fatalities in the 23 states with the highest gun ownership rate (52 percent, on average). The states with the lowest rates of gun ownership tended to be high-population places such as New York, while the highest rates of gun ownership were in low-population places such as Wyoming. So the researchers compared the 8 "low" states with 23 "high" states to arrive at comparable numbers of law enforcement officers employed in each group over the study period.

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[SheilaT]

1. But, but, guns make us SAFER!!

Don't they? So how could this annoying fact even exist?

Not to mention, of course, that countries that don't allow their citizens to own guns so freely somehow have a tiny fraction of the gun deaths we have here.

And in the gun control discussions, almost never is the number of those wounded and maimed by all these guns ever mentioned.

[jpak]

2. you mean "life saving devices"

generally unavailable in civilized countries...

[SheilaT]

5. Ah, yes, the lives those things save.

Not.

[morningfog]

7. Lol. You got the satire down.

[jpak]

9. That is the term gungeoneers use

series

yup

[Rex]

3. Makes sense. nt

nt

[jmg257]

4. Vast majorioty of officers killed feloniously are by firearm....roughly 50 a year,

466/505 from 2005-2014.


Kind of a small number considering the 400 million guns out there.

[Travis_0004]

6. I love this line from the study

We corrected for a number of factors that could also affect police officer homicide rates: overall rates of violent and property crime, the racial and economic demographics of the different states, income, education, alcohol consumption and rural/urban population break"

In other words, they changed the data to fit their conclusion.

[demosincebirth]

8. Police should be in the forefront of laws making it harder to buy them. I haven't

heard a whisper from police unions or organizations