Country-level firearm availability and terrorism: A new approach to examining the gun-crime relationship

• Author: Daren Fisher,Jennifer Varriale Carson,Rick Dierenfeldt
• DOI: 10.1177/00224278211046255
• Published date: 01 July 2022
• Date: 01 July 2022
• Subject Matter: Original Research Articles

Country-level

f‌irearm availability

and terrorism: A new

approach to

examining the gun-

crime relationship

Jennifer Varriale Carson

1

,

Rick Dierenfeldt

2

,

and Daren Fisher

3

Abstract

Objectives: This study examines the association between a country’s gun

availability and f‌irearm-related terrorism. Methods: Employing data from

140 countries, we assess the possible relationship between a country’s

rate of suicide by f‌irearm and their count of terrorist attacks involving a

f‌irearm through a series of structural equation models. Results:

Collectively, we f‌ind that there is a positive relationship between gun avail-

ability and f‌irearm-related terrorism in 2016 and 2017. However, this result

1

Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Central Missouri,

Warrensburg, MO, USA

2

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Chattanooga, TN, USA

3

Department of Criminal Justice, The Citadel, Charleston, SC, USA

Author order is alphabetical, all authors contributed equally.

Corresponding Author:

Jennifer Varriale Carson, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of

Central Missouri, 108 South Street, Humphreys 300, Warrensburg, MO 64093, USA.

Email: jcarson@ucmo.edu

Original Research Article

Journal of Research in Crime and

Delinquency

2022, Vol. 59(4) 449-486

© The Author(s) 2021

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/00224278211046255

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fails our robustness check and is sensitive to the inclusion of the U.S.

Conclusion: With important caveats, we believe the U.S. to be unique in

terms of both gun availability and terrorism.

Keywords

f‌irearm, gun, f‌irearm, structural equation modeling, terrorism, suicide

Worldwide trends in terrorism, def‌ined as “the threatened or actual use of

illegal force and violence to attain a political, economic, religious, or

social goal through fear, coercion, or intimidation,”(LaFree and Dugan

2007:184) have indicated a 9 percent drop in 2016 from the previous year

(Miller and Jensen 2017). Nonetheless, and even with this decrease, the inci-

dence of global terrorism has remained historically high with over 13,400

terrorist attacks in 2016 alone. Tragically, this year represented upwards

of 34,000 terrorism-related deaths.

One reason for this relatively

1

high number of fatalities resulting from

terrorism is that guns have become a favored terrorist weapon

(Gruenewald 2011; Legault and Hendrickson 2009; Miller 2015). Indeed,

this preference for f‌irearms has been correlated with enhanced lethality

(Jones et al. 2020; Tessler et al. 2017), likely linked to their increased prob-

ability of completion based on either their ease of use (Klein et al. 2017;

Mandala and Freilich 2018) or ability to avoid law enforcement interdiction

(Gruenewald et al. 2016). While such completion metrics coupled with

group-level factors are important to explaining terrorist weapon selection

(Jackson and Frelinger 2008; Jones et al. 2020; Koehler-Derrick and

Milton 2019), the main mechanism driving gun preference has appeared

to be ease of accessibility (Boutwell and Klare 1999; Hamm 2007;

Kinsella 2006; Legault and Hendrickson 2009).

Such accessibility is also identif‌ied as a key factor in Clarke and

Newman’s (2006) Outsmarting the Terrorists, an increasingly favored

application of situational crime perspective (SCP) to terrorism (Freilich

et al. 2019). Summarized under the acronym “MURDEROUS,”the

authors maintain that choice is driven by a weapon’s attributes, which

include their ability to be “M: Multipurpose,”“U: Undetectable,”“R:

Removable,”“D: Destructive,”“E: Enjoyable,”“R: Reliable,”“O:

Obtainable,”“U: Uncomplicated,”and “S: Safe.”Yet despite this frame-

work, coupled with the aforementioned ubiquity of f‌irearms within this phe-

nomenon, there has been little empirical evaluation of how these weapon

450 Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 59(4)

characteristics, and obtainability in particular (again, “O”from

“MURDEROUS”), affects terrorism as an outcome (Freilich et al. 2019).

Indeed, much of what we know about the effect of guns and gun policy

has been derived from studies about crime, despite evidence that terrorism

is a distinct offense (Hoffman 2017), which has been differentially affected

by policy (Dugan et al. 2005).

Despite these important differences, the larger gun-crime literature is

informative, particularly regarding how best to approach examining this

relationship from a methodological standpoint. More specif‌ically, critiques

of this trajectory of research have attributed the considerable variation in

f‌indings due to studies’limitations (Kleck 2015; Kovandzic et al. 2012,

2013). Such limitations include a reliance on descriptive and bivariate anal-

yses despite the likelihood of feedback relationships (Kleck 2015;

Kovandzic et al. 2012, 2013), the lack of non-f‌irearm outcomes and other

important controls (Britt et al. 1996; Kleck 2001), and measurement

issues motivating the need for alternative variables (Kleck 2015;

Kovandzic et al. 2012, 2013; LaFree 1999). The reliance on small sample

sizes (Hemenway and Miller 2000; Killias 1993a; Kleck 2015) and less

attention directed toward the potentially confounding inf‌luence of outliers

(Rosenbaum 2012) have also been noted as important issues in prior

research.

With these appraisals of the greater f‌irearm-crime literature in mind, this

study extends this research by examining the relationship between gun

availability and terrorism. Beyond assessing key tenets of situational

crime prevention and its application to terrorism, the f‌indings from this

study expand the scope of the broader impacts of f‌irearm possession on vio-

lence. Given that terrorism is a global phenomenon occurring in 104 coun-

tries in 2016 alone (Miller and Jensen 2017), we do so through a

comparative approach. Specif‌ically, we inquire: Does country-level gun

obtainability affect f‌irearm-related terrorism? By addressing this important

research question, we are able to: (1) explore whether such availability as a

proxy for gun policy has a unique effect on terrorism rather than crime and,

(2) do so through addressing several of the methodological issues presented

in the greater gun-crime literature, particularly through establishing why our

measure of terrorism is a more robust, cross-national indicator of violence.

Informed by an SCP to test a two-tailed hypothesis using structural equation

modeling (SEM) on a sample of 140 countries, we f‌ind a positive relation-

ship between these two constructs. However, our results are sensitive to the

exclusion of the U.S. suggesting its role as a “high leverage outlier”in not

just with crime, but terrorism as well.

Carson et al. 451