From the department of Well Duh!

[flamin lib]

-Police Officers Are Three Times More Likely to Be Killed On the Job in States With Higher Rates of Gun Ownership

http://www.thetrace.org/2015/08/police-homicide-gun-ownership-study/

A study released Thursday finds that states with higher rates of private gun ownership have significantly higher rates of law enforcement homicides, or the murder of an officer in the line of duty.
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Swedler and his colleagues looked for relationships between law enforcement homicides and population ages, median income, divorce rate, racial makeup, violent crime rate, and private firearm ownership, each time controlling for other factors. No factor studied, including violent crime rate, had a significant statistical correlation to the murders of police officers — except for statewide rate of gun ownership.
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Swedler says that the relationship between gun ownership and law enforcement homicides is most apparent in domestic violence incidents. “We found in a previous study that domestic violence calls are one of the leading situations in which the officers are killed,” he says. “In a state where there’s more guns, officers are more often going to be showing up at domestic violence scenes where guns are present, as opposed to officers showing up at domestic violence scenes in states with lower rates of gun ownership.”

The study only demonstrates a correlation between gun ownership and homicides of law enforcement officers. It does not show causation, and as Swedler readily admits, “It’s not a one-to-one all the way across.” Each of the states with a higher rate of gun ownership does not necessarily have a higher rate of per-capita officer homicides. But a general pattern emerges, at a rate of three to one, as you move to the extremes — the states with the most and least guns. The BRFSS is also a self-report survey, so it does have limitations, although the researchers also utilized the Center for Disease Control’s statistics on firearm suicides in each state — a common proxy for gun ownership — and found a similar relationship to officer homicides.

To be certain, there are exceptions and there is no one-for-one relationship. New Hampshire, for instance is in the second quintile of ownership and top for cop homicide and Wyoming is in the top quintile for ownership and bottom for cop homicide. Perhaps the fact that there are fewer people in Wyoming than in Ft. Worth has something to do with that. Even with the exceptions there is a clear pattern.

As an aside I can vouch for the domestic calls being the most dangerous. Ask any LEO, they'll tell you it scares shit out of them to make one of those calls. So for me it makes sense that states with higher ownership rates would have higher risk for cop homicide on domestic violence calls alone. It's the swimming pool rule; a house with a swimming pool and one without, which is more likely to have a drowning?

[Faux pas]

1. Wonder how much

they spent on that study?