Firearm purchasing and firearm violence during the coronavirus pandemic in the United States: a cross-sectional study
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Abstract
Background
Firearm violence is a significant public health problem in the United States. A surge in firearm purchasing following the onset of the coronavirus pandemic may have contributed to an increase in firearm violence. We sought to estimate the state-level association between firearm purchasing and interpersonal firearm violence during the pandemic.
Methods
Cross-sectional study of the 48 contiguous states and the District of Columbia from January 2018 through July 2020. Data were obtained from the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (a proxy for firearm purchasing) and the Gun Violence Archive. Using negative binomial regression models, we estimated the association between cumulative excess firearm purchases in March through July 2020 (measured as the difference between observed rates and those expected from autoregressive integrated moving average models) and injuries (including nonfatal and fatal) from intentional, interpersonal firearm violence (non-domestic and domestic violence).
Results
We estimated that there were 4.3 million excess firearm purchases nationally from March through July 2020 and a total of 4075 more firearm injuries than expected from April through July. We found no relationship between state-level excess purchasing and non-domestic firearm violence, e.g., each excess purchase per 100 population was associated with a rate ratio (RR) of firearm injury from non-domestic violence of 0.76 (95% CI: 0.50–1.02) in April; 0.99 (95% CI: 0.72–1.25) in May; 1.10 (95% CI: 0.93–1.32) in June; and 0.98 (95% CI: 0.85–1.12) in July. Excess firearm purchasing within states was associated with an increase in firearm injuries from domestic violence in April (RR: 2.60; 95% CI: 1.32–5.93) and May (RR: 1.79; 95% CI: 1.19–2.91), though estimates were sensitive to model specification.
Conclusions
Nationwide, firearm purchasing and firearm violence increased substantially during the first months of the coronavirus pandemic. At the state level, the magnitude of the increase in purchasing was not associated with the magnitude of the increase in firearm violence. Increases in purchasing may have contributed to additional firearm injuries from domestic violence in April and May. Results suggest much of the rise in firearm violence during our study period was attributable to other factors, indicating a need for additional research.
Article activity feed
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.07.02.20145508: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Limitations: We cannot infer causality from these observational data. First, though the coronavirus pandemic presents an exogenous shock, our design is subject to confounding insofar as other effects of the pandemic may influence firearm violence through pathways other than changes in purchasing. To mitigate bias, we included all …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.07.02.20145508: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Limitations: We cannot infer causality from these observational data. First, though the coronavirus pandemic presents an exogenous shock, our design is subject to confounding insofar as other effects of the pandemic may influence firearm violence through pathways other than changes in purchasing. To mitigate bias, we included all hypothesized and measurable confounders: stay-at-home orders, a measure of compliance with social distancing guidelines, coronavirus cases and deaths, and temperature and precipitation. There may be residual confounding by unmeasured or unmeasurable factors. Second, 6-month leading values of the exposure, when defined as the percentage change in purchasing, were associated with firearm violence rates. This could indicate reverse causation, i.e., that an increase in violence caused an increase in firearm purchasing, that the spike began before March in some states due to earlier effects of the pandemic, or that a third, confounding variable, led states with already high levels of violence to experience greater spikes in purchasing. It is unlikely that our results are explained by these mechanisms, however, because we did not observe an association in the 3 months before March 2020 or when measuring excess purchasing in absolute terms. Despite the limitations of the present study, our estimates are strong and consistent, include evidence of a linear dose-response relationship, and are plausible and consistent with the existing literature. 47 There are ...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
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Strength of evidence
Reviewers: Jared D. Fisher (UC Berkeley), David W. Puelz (University of Chicago) | 📒📒📒◻️◻️
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Jared D. Fisher, David W. Puelz
Review 1: "Firearm Purchasing and Firearm Violence in the First Months of the Coronavirus Pandemic in the United States"
This pre-print shows an association between firearm purchases and firearm violence during the pandemic; however, clarification is needed about the soundness of the methods used and how to elucidate further the causality at play.
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