Study Finds Gun Violence Rises in Rural US as Deer Hunting Season Approaches

In rural America, the increased presence of loaded guns in homes and vehicles could lead to an increase in firearm injuries and homicides at the start of each deer hunting season, a new study warns.

In fact, in the rural U.S. counties covered in the study, “more people were shot and killed 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 sociology professor at Princeton University in New Jersey.

That conclusion held even after his team took into account gun deaths related to hunting accidents, which they said are extremely rare.

The study was published August 14 in the journal Opening of the JAMA network.

As Sharkey and colleagues noted, the availability of firearms, particularly when unlocked and loaded, has long been associated with increased risks of gun violence.

Researchers suspected that the annual opening of deer hunting season was the perfect time to test this theory, as millions of hunters across the United States pull their guns out of storage.

The study tracked statistics from 2014 to 2021 on shootings that occurred in 854 rural U.S. counties across 44 states.

The researchers calculated the rate of shootings during the week before the opening date of the annual deer hunting season in each county, and compared those numbers to shootings that occurred during the first three weeks of the hunting season.

The result: Gun shootings that injured or killed county residents increased an average of 49 percent in the first week of the season compared with the previous week, Sharkey’s team reported.

That rate was still 41 percent higher in the second week, but the increase fell to “near zero” by the third week of the deer hunting season.

The sharp rise and fall over those three weeks is not surprising, the Princeton group said, because data has shown that in Wisconsin, for example, “70 percent of deer harvested each year are killed in the first nine days of the season.”

Moreover, the shooting trends “were largely replicated when (rare) hunting accidents were removed from the analysis,” they added, suggesting that the majority of shootings were interpersonal violence.

Again, this is not surprising: A previous study in rural counties found a 300% increase in arrests involving men armed with shotguns at the start of each deer hunting season, the researchers noted.

“The totality of the evidence leads us to conclude that the most plausible explanation for the increase in shootings the week following the start of deer hunting season is the increased presence of firearms in public and private spaces,” the study authors write.

As for what can be done to reduce the risk, Sharkey’s group believes that “strengthened firearms regulations governing the storage, carrying and purchase of firearms, particularly in states where deer hunting is popular, could serve to reduce the number of shootings that occur early in the hunting season.”

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