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In what may be the most poorly conceived and horribly researched study ever published by The Journal of the American Medical Association during its entire 141-year history, a trio of anti-gun researchers now claims deer hunting is associated with a substantial increase in firearm violence. 

To arrive at their laughable conclusion, the authors used data from the infamous Gun Violence Archive, which has been debunked dozens of times and is well known for its shoddy research and biased statistics. 

Even the authors admitted there were problems with the GVA data. “Our study relies on shooting data from a single source, the GVA. Data from GVA have been shown to have a bias toward incidents that receive more media attention and do not include comprehensive counts of firearm suicides,” the report states.

Despite these inherent biases, the researchers used the GVA data anyway. They didn’t allow the facts to interfere with their preconceived and biased narrative. 

The report, “Deer Hunting Season and Firearm Violence in US Rural Counties,” which was released Wednesday, was written by Patrick Sharkey, PhD; Juan Camilo Cristancho, BA, and Daniel Semenza, PhD. 

Sharkey is affiliated with Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. Cristancho works at the University of California, Irvine’s School of Education, and Semenza is affiliated with the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at Rutgers University. 

The researchers sought to investigate “the association between the start of deer hunting season and shootings in rural counties of the US.” 

They compared shootings during the first three weeks of deer season to a week prior to the season opener. The authors claim there was a “substantial increase in shootings” during the start of deer season, which they said calls for additional gun control, of course. 

“The findings highlight the role of firearm prevalence in gun violence and suggest the need for focused policies designed to reduce firearm violence in areas with substantial hunting activity during the first weeks of deer hunting season,” the report states. 

About the Author 

Patrick Sharkey, PhD, led the research team. 

“Dr. Sharkey had full access to all of the data in the study and takes responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis,” his report claims. 

According to his Princeton bio, Sharkey’s research focuses on “urban inequality, violence, and public policy.” He is also the creator of AmericanViolence.org, a website that claims it provides “comprehensive, updated data on violence from as many of the largest 100 largest U.S. cities as possible.”

AmericanViolence.org, like Sharkey’s recent study, relies upon debunked data. “In the latest iteration of the site we have drawn more heavily on data on fatal and nonfatal shootings published by the Gun Violence Archive, an excellent resource that has tracked all forms of gun violence in the United States over time,” the website states. 

AmericanViolence.org is funded by Arnold Ventures. A story published earlier this month revealed that Arnold Ventures is a Houston-based for-profit corporation founded by billionaires Laura and John Arnold, who quietly bankroll research that promotes and supports their radical anti-gun views. Arnold Ventures and its companion foundation have more than $3.5 billion in assets, and regularly fund anti-gun research at Princeton and other colleges and universities. 

According to the Laura and John Arnold Foundation’s 2022 IRS form 990, the couple spent $1.7 million on anti-gun research, including $1,065,933 to Sharkey’s employer, Princeton University, “to develop a research infrastructure that helps cities better understand and respond to waves of gun violence.”

Arnold Ventures acknowledges that it seeks to bridge the gap in anti-gun research, which it says was created by the 1996 Dickey Amendment, which prohibits the federal government from conducting anti-gun research.

Don’t Get Mad About Guns — Get Funding for Research, the group advertises on its website.  

Sharkey has written dozens of journal articles and essays on “gun violence.” 

Sharkey was not willing to be interviewed for this story, but in an email, he offered three reasons for his use of GVA data, which even he admitted was biased. 

“First, the Gun Violence Archive has become one of the most important sources of data on firearm violence and is used extensively in the health literature. I’ve listed below a set of 10 or so articles in top journals that analyze data from GVA, and there are many more out there. Second, our approach looks at shootings in the week before the start of deer season compared to the weeks after the start of deer season, so we’re comparing the same counties before and after the start of deer season. If one were to argue that the data source is leading to bias in our results than one would have to give a reason why the data would be more or less reliable in the first week of deer season relative to the week before deer season. That seems implausible. Third, the main reason we use the GVA data is that to carry out this analysis we need a data source that provides the number of shootings in specific places on specific days – our entire approach depends on being able to compare the precise week before deer season to the weeks after the start of deer season, and no other data source on shootings allows for that kind of precision,” Sharkey said in an email. “I should say that I hope this article doesn’t come across as advocating against deer hunting. I think it’s a hugely important and fun part of our culture. What we’re doing is trying to figure out how the prevalence of guns out in public and private spaces affects shootings. The goal is to get the right answer, and hopefully that allows for some objective ways to figure out how to reduce shootings.”

Reaction  

Sharkey’s study is a twofer for the gun ban industry, as it denigrates both hunting and gun ownership. Nowhere in the report do the researchers mention the dangers associated with an overabundance of deer, which would occur if hunting was banned or reduced.  

“Deer hunting is quite possibly the most important tool in modern wildlife management. It is critical to controlling herd size and generates tens of millions of dollars in revenue for state wildlife resource agencies and local economies. It is a time-honored tradition in rural America, not a launchpad for lunatics or criminals,” said Dave Workman, editor-in -chief of TheGunMag.com, and an award-winning outdoor writer, lifelong deer hunter and career journalist. “Suggesting that deer hunting is somehow connected to violent crime involving firearms is an insult to the millions of law-abiding American sportsmen and women, young and old, who annually head to the forests, plains, and mountains in hopes of notching a tag and making a lifetime memory.”

Second Amendment Foundation founder and Executive Vice President, Alan M. Gottlieb, reacted strongly to the report: 

“This is ludicrous! Deer hunting leads to freezers full of venison, not gun violence,” Gottlieb said. “While this JAMA study may be laughable, it proves that the gun-ban industry and its biased researchers are willing to say anything to infringe upon our Second Amendment rights, even if it defies all logic and common sense.” 

This story is courtesy of the Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project. Click here to make a tax-deductible donation to support more pro-gun stories like this.

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41 COMMENTS

  1. The AMA has been politically hijacked by Marxists, where scientific research is subservient to a radical political agenda, as with ALL our professional organizations now. ANY organization that supports the left’s twisted demented agenda of cutting off the genitals of 10 year olds and also pushed the use of unproven and dangerous experimental drugs on society, killing and maiming maybe million or more in this country, has lost all semblance of a connection to reality AND ANY usefulness to society!!!!!

      • “The deer are just asking for it. Out standing in the roads etc.”

        If I were a hunter, this fall I would get my revenge on those deer trying to take my guns away… 😉

  3. Well, from the perspective of a deer, deer hunting does result in more gun violence. It depends on the context…

  4. Very sad when JAMA becomes a non-scientific journal. This is a perfect demonstration of the scientific adage: Multiple anecdotes do not make data. And… correlation does not equal causation.

    ” Shootings in the first 3 weeks of deer hunting season were compared with the week prior to the start of deer hunting season.”

    Forget about the fact that they used GVA as their singular source of data… What stands out to me (as someone with an education based entirely in Science), is the study design which compared the 3-week hunting period to only a SINGLE week before hunting season. This is very odd (and significant), in my opinion.

    Why did they pick THAT week? And ONLY that week? I think we all know the answer… Confirmation Bias. It’s a VERY narrow window of time for comparison. Why not ALL the other off-season weeks in the year? Take an average of ALL those off-season weeks, eh? Duh!

    This “study” is a sham. It should have never made it past peer-review.

    • Also the lack of interest in an obvious control group, seeing whether a similar increase occurred in urban counties during the same time frame.

    • Confirmation bias. They didn’t draw conclusions from the data. They picked data that matched their pre decided conclusion.

  5. Two problems I see immediately. First, are these increased shootings taking place among hunters? More people are out and about the first week of deer hunting season this in and of itself can lead to increased violence. Second, some hunters see getting out as an excuse to drink. Could increased alcohol consumption be a factor?

    Of course we also see a tendency for the media to make a bigger deal out of fatalities during the hunt.

    • yeah I was wondering that too, are the shooters or victims hunters or some other population unrelated? If you can’t tell that aggressive hunters finished killing Bambi and then decided to do some drive bys in the neighborhood, then it could be the season, cooler weather, phase of the moon, random chance, etc.

    • Is the study trying to prove rural gun owners are the cause of urban gun violence? The correlation is very tenuous at best.

  6. Tools. JAMA has become a useful tool for political goals. Medical professionals are expected to maintain detachment, and a scientific approach to problems. Here, they have done neither. JAMA has simply sold out to a political agenda. Worse, they admit that they are using faulty data, but insist on forging ahead in an attempt to “study” a foregone conclusion. This is worse than a military veteran who comes out against guns – few veterans pass themselves off as being related to science. This is worse than police chiefs who hate guns. This is on par with “scientists” who justify riots in the name of “equity”. JAMA joins the ranks of institutions that once deserved respect, but have squandered their positions of authority. If JAMA hopes to recover that respect, they need to restrict themselves to medical issues. They have no business venturing into politics, or being lapdogs to the wealthy.

  7. Well, of course. If someone can shoot a deer with those beautiful brown eyes, shooting people would be no problem.

    • Exactly – my father Buck was murdered by a hunter back around the time of WW2, a hunter whom SHOULD have been overseas shooting krauts. No one even remembers the documentary written about it any more, which should be shown in schools still to this day. You know they make meat out of all other sorts of things these days.

  8. Of course hunting causes more violence. As does being born or breathing. The authoritarian left is searching for any excuse to disarm everyone but their trusted agents.
    Look at the history of the leftists. Look at the history of the people being disarmed.
    Gun control only benefits the few in power. Allowing those in power to crush any dissent or disagreeable thoughts.
    I for one prefer messy freedom over ordered or comfortable slavery.

    • Plus, the idea of future gun control is an easy policy to preach to the Dem voting crowd. It doesn’t take any sort of creativeness. There will always be another gun to take. It’s just like abortion. There will always be more babies to kill. These policies are perpetual safe bets for them.

      It’s ironic how they simultaneously push for gun control, as a means of decreasing murder, while they’re also pushing the limits of abortion to include full term and even post-birth.

  9. I understand there has been an extraordinary increase in deer hunting in downtown Chicago this year. Perhaps that explains the recent increase in murders there.

    • Perhaps if the progs in City gov’t constructed practice ranges on the Southside marksmanship would improve and the feral animal population would be reduced.

  10. AMA admits 250,000 Medical Malpractice Deaths Annually
    Trial Lawyers Claim 480,000 Medical Malpractice Deaths Annually

    If we average the two, it comes out to about 360,000 Medical Malpractice Deaths per year, or, 1,000 Deaths Every Day. Rifles, on the other hand, kill maybe 2 Persons Per Day.

    AMA needs to spend more time on training healthcare workers to do their job correctly and less time worrying about firearms.

    • Ban…doctor’s?!? It makes more sense than banning folk’s trying for haunch of venison. Funny but doesn’t the dim left present Tampon Tim as some kind of hero because he killed deer? Or kills fish??? Or steals valor? Oh wait🙄😀

    • How about trainee doctors NOT having to work 96 hours straight in some perverse hazing to “toughen them up”.

      Someone who hasn’t slept in 24+ hours is impaired as someone with at least a 0.05 Blood-Alcohol level. It gets worse the longer they are kept awake.

  11. “If one were to argue that the data source is leading to bias in our results than one would have to give a reason why the data would be more or less reliable in the first week of deer season relative to the week before deer season. That seems implausible”

    Really? A reason? You already gave the reason, you admitted it yourself with “Data from GVA have been shown to have a bias toward incidents that receive more media attention…”

    There’s your reason, you started with biased data

    So lets see:

    The ‘hunting increases gun violence’ angle, ya think that has not been tried before using GVA information?

    There are literally hundreds of ‘shooting’ entries in the GVA database that happened around and during ‘the first week of deer season’ that never happened. The GVA pulls data from media sources and rarely actually vets them for accuracy, and it turns out the story they pulled it from was wrong to begin with and ‘mis-reported’.

    Heck, there are shootings in the GVA that never happened. But because a media article said it did it went into the GVA and the media wrongly reported it as a shooting because someone said they ‘heard a loud bang’ or something else and thought it was gun shots and called the cops. The media picked up on it and reported it because the police responded to investigate and the next thing you know a headline “Police respond to mass shooting at…” or some other non-sense, but what they did not report was the conclusion of the police response with “hey, it was a truck backfire. There was no shooting.” or something similar. But that didn’t stop the GVA from putting it in the ‘mass shooting’ numbers. There are hundreds of incorrect entries in the GVA.

    Yes, your GVA data source is leading to bias in your results. But it seems you are happy with that bias because ya want to twist it around so that if anyone challenges your results the burden is on them to give “a reason why the data would be more or less reliable in the first week of deer season relative to the week before deer season” which seems an awful lot like you trying to justify your biased results as valid.

    Not only the above, but, the GVA counts valid legal self defense as ‘mass shooting’. For example, the incident in the mall where the law abiding gun owner saw and prevented a ‘mass shooter’ from firing a shot by engaging them first – the mass shooter retreated to cover and killed him self, but because others in the mall were fleeing and some fell down and got injured as a result of the fall the GVA considered them ‘victims of a mass shooting’ and included it as a mass shooting in their numbers even though the mass shooter never fired a shot. Another example, a woman defended her family and self against four armed home invaders that were for a fact going to kill them and had even started in on the children – she used her AR-15 and standard capacity magazines (e.g. 30 round magazine) to defend (one bad guy shot, the rest ran) and the GVA counted it as a ‘mass shooting’.

    The GVA does not, contrary to their claims, actually vet the media stories they use. The left wing media sources are more often wrong than they are right, a lot of times intentionally wrong, for their claimed ‘shootings’. Yet GVA just takes it at face value and and doesn’t actually vet the information to ensure its accuracy or truthfulness and never follows up to look for corrections or retractions for the original story.

    The GVA definitions are self-serving and exploited frequently by them. For example, ‘school shooting’ – a guy with a youtube channel contacted them when he did the research using the GVA’s own sources and exposed the inflated numbers on his youtube channel. It turns out The GVA includes a lot of incidents that were not ‘school shootings’. For example: a couple of kids with a BB gun during summer vacation when school is out, were walking to somewhere else to shoot their BB gun in a wooded area. During their walk they crossed through the school parking lot, school was closed due to summer vacation, it was empty, no one there, but a local resident saw them and called the police. The police showed up, but in the mean time the person who called the police contacted the media and reported to them ‘a shooter at a school and police were responding’ and of course it became a headline about police responding to a school shooting and GVA picked up on it. The cops didn’t do anything to the kids and sent them on their way, but the news article stayed and never updated to reflect it was not a school shooting. The GVA included this incident in their numbers as a ‘school shooting’.

    The GVA data is biased no matter what they claim, their numbers are very much falsely over inflated and wrong. Any researcher who would trust the GVA data enough to included it in a study, is a fool and ignorant.

    I especially liked the ones the GVA counted as ‘mass shooting’ they were called out on in the past where no mass shooting happened and there were no victim bodies – being in the field of physics myself I especially got a big laugh out of them. The GVA response was basically ‘well, an AR-15 bullet completely vaporizes the victim so that’s why there are no bodies of the victims and no traces of victims, clothing, blood, bone, dna, all gone completely vaporized’ in trying to explain why they counted as mass shooting when there were no victims (and in some of these pointed out there wasn’t even a gun and no shots at all, someone heard a loud noise and thought it was gun shots and they reported to media that someone was shooting). Its impossible, a violation of the laws of physics, for a bullet from an AR-15 to vaporize a human body so completely as to leave no trace one ever existed as such a bullet simply does not have the energy needed to do such. To so completely vaporize a human body like that would take a lot of energy. To give you an idea of the amount of energy such a bullet would need to impart on the whole of a human body on impact to so completely vaporize it as the GVA indicated, using the size and mass of a .223/5.56 round, if such a bullet with enough energy to so completely vaporize the human body were fired the very first one ever fired that impacted anything at all that impact energy for that size bullet and its mass, that energy would have obliterated planet earth and you would not have been here to publish this very biased and wrong ‘study’ in fact none of us would be here today. And that’s why their excuse made me laugh, because I knew already it was impossible and they were lying.

  12. This reminds me of the incident in which a Portland police officer was killed in a hunting accident by a colleague. He was mistaken for a bull elk, three point or better. The shooter heroically evacuated the shootee and got him to a hospital. The doctors say the shootee might have lived if the shooter hadn’t gutted him first.

    Maybe these quacks should do a study of the correlation between firearms violence and the prevalence of basketball courts? After all, almost two-thirds of homicides with firearms are committed by African-Americans.

  13. On the subject of gun related surveys – Anyone know of a study asking “would/did you lie on the question “do you own a gun/one in the household”.

    I’d speculate most here would profess to not even knowing what a firearm is if and unknown CNN/AP/misc prog organization called them with “gun violence” survey. Result being all their “data” is massive undercount BS.

    https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/24/key-facts-about-americans-and-guns/

  14. The week or two or three before hunting season, I expect many if not most hunters are out sighting in their rifles. I see them at the range. Why no increase in “gun violence” then?

    This “study” is a JOKE.

  16. I once spoke with an undercover in Hartford. He mentioned that when the big schools semesters began there was a wave of shootings. His conclusion was the newly moving in kids with Daddy’s money created a strong street drug demand which stimulated street level drug dealers to shoot their competitors. He very emphatically told me to not drive around a car that stopped for a transaction due cross fire hazard.

  19. Didn’t JAMA tell us dr.(?) Fraudci’s and Moderna’s/Pfizer’s/J&J’s non-vax (poison) was “safe AND effective” and would prevent one contracting the Chi-Nah Pox, why “yes” they did. I wouldn’t trust those quacks to treat a blister.

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