Firearm Availability and Fatal Police Shootings

• DOI: 10.1177/0002716219896259
• Author: Daniel S. Nagin
• Published date: 01 January 2020
• Date: 01 January 2020
• Subject Matter: Patterns of Fatal Police Shootings

896259ANN
THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMYFIREARM AVAILABILITY AND FATAL POLICE SHOOTINGS
research-article2019
Do states with more guns have higher rates of fatal
police shootings? This article uses a validated measure
of firearm availability (the percentage of suicides com-
mitted with a firearm) to examine the relationship
between gun proliferation and fatal police shootings. It
expands on existing research to include (1) measures of
access to Level I and II trauma centers, (2) interpreta-
tion of the findings from the lenses of “statistical pre-
diction,” and (3) tests for structural differences between
Firearm
models for black decedents versus nonblack decedents.
Findings confirm the correlation between statewide
Availability and prevalence of gun ownership and fatal police shootings
for both all decedents and unarmed decedents. It pro-
vides partial support for “statistical prediction” by
Fatal Police police and finds that greater access to trauma centers is
associated with lower rates of citizen deaths. The analy-
Shootings
sis suggests a far broader range of policy options for
saving lives, such as better enforcement of legal restric-
tions on firearm possession, than focusing solely on
policing systems.
Keywords: fatal police shootings; firearm availability;
trauma services
By
DANIEL S. NAGIN
“An unarmed police depends, of course, upon an
unarmed citizenry.”
—Albert J. Reiss, Jr. (1971, 182)
Since 2014, highly publicized instances of fatal
police shootings have reopened scrutiny of the
factors that trigger deadly encounters with the
police. Research on this issue has been limited,
in part, because data from government sources
cataloguing even a count of instances of fatal
police shootings in the United States is woefully
Daniel S. Nagin is Teresa and H. John Heinz III
University Professor of Public Policy and Statistics at
Carnegie Mellon University, an elected fellow of
American Academy of Political and Social Science, and
the recipient of the Stockholm Prize in Criminology in
2014 and National Academy of Science Award for
Scientific Reviewing in 2017.
Correspondence: dn03@andrew.cmu.edu
DOI: 10.1177/0002716219896259
ANNALS, AAPSS, 687, January 2020 49

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THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
incomplete (Barber et al. 2016; Zimring 2017). The research that has been done
has focused on community factors such as racial composition and levels of vio-
lence (Klinger et al. 2016; Takagi 1974; Goldkamp 1976) or the impact of police
adoption of less lethal technologies than firearms (Ferdik et al. 2014). The
research of Zimring (2017) and Sherman (2018), however, set the stage for a
broadening of the inquiry into putative causes of this pressing but neglected
problem.
This analysis focuses on another possible contributing factor to the problem—
the availability of firearms. Hemenway et al. (2018) reported a strong state-by-
state relationship between rates of fatal police shootings and the household
prevalence of firearms availability. Using the Washington Post multisource data-
base, the authors found a pronounced positive relationship across the fifty states
between state rates of fatal police shootings and firearm prevalence. The analysis
in this article expands on the Hemenway et al. study by adding new data, new
concepts, and new models. The evidence presented here suggests a far broader
range of policy options for saving lives—such as better enforcement of legal
restrictions on firearm possession and rapid transport of shooting victims to
trauma centers—than focusing solely on police behavior, or even police
systems.
Analytic Context
Deadly force is justified when an individual poses a serious threat to the safety of
the on-scene officers or bystanders (Harmon 2008). An armed individual is a
prime example of such a threat. Klinger et al. (2016), in an analysis of police
shootings in St. Louis, MO, report that in 79 percent of incidents in which police
discharge their weapon, at least one of the suspects possessed a firearm. Zimring
(2017) analyzes a dataset assembled by The Guardian of fatal police shootings in
the United States in 2015 and reports that in 56 percent of those instances, the
decedent possessed a firearm. For the data used in this analysis, which was
assembled by the Washington Post and covers the period 2015 to 2018, the per-
centage of decedents possessing a firearm is the same as in the Guardian data—
56 percent.
Because firearms, unlike most other weapons, provide the capacity to inflict
bodily harm at a distance, suspects possessing firearms pose a particularly high
risk to police officers. Zimring (2017) argues that weapon availability is the only
plausible explanation for the vastly higher rates of fatal police shootings in the
United States compared to European countries. Still, the linkage between fire-
arm availability and fatal police shootings is not obvious. As described in Cook
(2018), presently only 31 percent of U.S. households possess firearms. For the
vast majority of those owners, there is no realistic prospect of their using the
weapon for an illegal purpose. But Cook (2018, 360) goes on to observe, “In
jurisdictions in which gun possession...