Police officers are most likely to be killed in states where the most people own guns, a new study finds.
The report is sure to be controversial, but it adds a new dimension to a conversation that’s recently been focused more on police shootings of unarmed Americans.
This study looks at who’s killing the cops, and it’s overwhelmingly people with private guns, David Swedler of the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health found.
“If we’re interested in protecting police officers, we need to look at what’s killing them, and what’s killing them is guns,” says Swedler.
Swedler’s team used the FBI’s Uniformed Crime Reporting database to check on all homicides of law enforcement officers between 1996 and 2010. They used a giant survey called the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to get data on gun ownership.
Their findings: The No. 1 cause of on-the-job death for police is motor vehicle accidents. But gun deaths came second, they reported in the American Journal of Public Health.
“We were not surprised to find that firearm ownership is associated with homicide rates,” Swedler told NBC news.
“The big surprise finding to me was the differences in homicide rates among officers in states with the lowest gun ownership compared to states with highest gun ownership,” he added.
“Officers are three times more likely to be murdered on the job in high gun ownership states in comparison with low gun ownership states. That was the big wow for me.”
Police and sheriffs’ organizations disagree on gun laws, gun control and gun ownership and whether limits would help reduce crime.
Read more at NBC NEWS