1 Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice,
University of Maryland, College Park
2 Jerry Lee Center of Criminology, University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia
Correspondence and reprint requests to:
Dr Christopher S Koper, Jerry Lee Center of Criminology, University of
Pennsylvania, 3814 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA;
ckoper@sas.upenn.edu
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ABSTRACT |
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Setting: Jersey City, New Jersey from 1992 through 1996.
Methods: Using police records on fatal and non-fatal handgun
assaults, t tests and
2 tests were
employed to determine if attacks with
pistols
result in more shots fired than those with revolvers, leading to more
gunshot victims and more severely wounded victims.
Results: More shots were fired in attacks with pistols (average = 3.2 to 3.7) than in attacks with revolvers (average = 2.3 to 2.6). Although pistol use was unrelated to the probability that an incident resulted in any injury or death, it was associated with a 15% increase in the number of wounded victims in those cases in which people were shot (1.15 per pistol case, 1.0 per revolver case), implying that the total number of gunshot victims may have been 9.4% lower had pistols not been used in any attacks. Pistol use was not related to the number of wounds per gunshot victim.
Conclusions: The findings provide limited evidence that recent growth in the production and use of pistols has contributed to higher levels of gunshot victimizations. However, available data did not permit an assessment of whether the associations between gun types and assault outcomes are mediated by characteristics of incidents and actors.
Keywords: firearms; wounds; violence; gunshot
Criminal misuse of firearms continues to be one of America’s most serious crime and public health problems. Although rates of gun crime have fallen substantially in recent years,1, 2 over 10 000 persons were murdered with firearms in 2000 and another 49 000 assault victims were treated in hospitals for non-fatal gunshot wounds.1, 3 The lifetime medical costs of gunshot injuries total approximately two billion dollars a year, with the majority of these costs stemming from criminal assaults.4
Handguns are heavily involved in firearm violence, accounting for 80% or more of guns used in urban crimes and homicides.5–7 During recent decades, there has been a shift away from production of revolvers to production of semiautomatic pistols in the civilian handgun market. Pistols grew from 28% of handgun production in 1973 to 46% by 1985 and to 80% by 1993.8, 9 This trend is also apparent in criminal weaponry, as pistols have overtaken revolvers as the predominant type of handgun used in crime.5
Semiautomatic pistols permit a somewhat more rapid rate of fire than do revolvers, and they often have larger ammunition capacities. The firing mechanism of a semiautomatic firearm loads a new round automatically after each shot. In most pistol models, the gun also recocks for firing automatically after each shot, thereby requiring less pressure on the trigger to fire after the first shot than is required with a revolver, which cocks for firing as the trigger is pulled.10, 11
Further, a pistol holds ammunition in a detachable magazine. Pistol magazines manufactured before September 1994 commonly hold five to 17 bullets, and magazines produced for some models take as many as 30 or more bullets.12 Production of pistols with magazines holding more than 10 rounds grew during the 1980s and early 1990s,11 but was interrupted by the federal Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (that is, the 1994 Crime Act), which now limits magazine capacity to 10 bullets. However, larger magazines manufactured before 13 September 1994 are still legal to possess and transfer. Revolvers, in contrast, hold ammunition in a revolving cylinder that typically has five to six bullets (and sometimes up to nine bullets).12
Pistols enable shooters to fire more shots more rapidly, potentially increasing the number of persons hit and wounds inflicted per shooting incident. Accordingly, it is possible that the increasing substitution of pistols for revolvers has increased deaths and injuries from gun violence. Such concerns have spurred legislation to restrict or deter the use of semiautomatic weaponry. In addition to limiting ammunition magazine capacity, for example, the federal 1994 Crime Act banned semiautomatic assault weapons (a group of semiautomatic, military-style pistols, rifles, and shotguns) and established penalty enhancements for violent and drug trafficking crimes committed with semiautomatics.
Yet evidence linking the spread of semiautomatic weaponry to higher levels of gun deaths and injuries is limited and equivocal. A few studies made indirect links between the growing use of semiautomatics and rising levels of gun homicide and injuries in some cities during the late 1980s and early 1990s.7, 13, 14 However, other studies failed to demonstrate convincing links between city level trends in the use of semiautomatics and lethal gun violence.15, 16 National data also present mixed signs as to whether gun attacks have become more injurious and lethal as semiautomatics have become more prevalent.2, 17, 18
There is little direct empirical evidence on how semiautomatics affect attack outcomes. A few studies of firearm homicides suggest that pistol attacks involve more shots fired on average than attacks with revolvers and that victims killed with semiautomatics having large ammunition magazines (that is, those holding over 10 bullets) tend to receive more wounds than victims killed with other guns.7, 19 However, there have been no studies comparing the injuriousness and lethality of attacks with pistols and revolvers. We address this gap using data on handgun homicides and non-fatal handgun assaults investigated by police in Jersey City, New Jersey during the early to mid-1990s.
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METHODS |
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The data for this study were collected from the homicide and aggravated assault files of the Jersey City Police Department. Comparisons of police and medical examiner records in urban jurisdictions show police records to be a highly accurate source of data for homicide cases.22–24 Police records are the single most comprehensive source for city level estimates of non-fatal, assaultive gunshot injuries in places (like Jersey City) that do not have firearm injury surveillance systems that combine police and medical data.23, 25 Moreover, police records are the only data source that can provide city level estimates of gun assaults not resulting in injury, thereby permitting examination of shots fired and hit rates for all gunfire incidents. However, the most minor types of gun assaults (for example, threats without gunfire, assaults resulting in minor or no wounds) tend to be under-represented even in police data.26 We assume that this bias works comparably for cases involving pistols and revolvers.
Jersey City police investigated 592 homicides and aggravated assaults involving handguns between January 1992 and November 1996. By law, aggravated assaults include cases in which offenders threatened victims with firearms, as well as cases in which offenders shot or attempted to shoot victims. From the case files, project staff recorded information on shots fired, the number of wounded victims, the number of wounds suffered by each victim, and the type(s) of firearm used in the attack as described by police and/or witnesses.
We estimated shots fired based on reported gunshot injuries, physical evidence (for example, shell casings found at the scene), and the accounts of witnesses and actors. If there was conflicting evidence about the number of shots, we established minimum and maximum ranges. If, for example, police found three shell casings at the scene but witnesses reported four shots, then we coded three as the minimum number of shots fired and four as the maximum number of shots fired. For many cases, the shots fired estimate represents a lower bound. To illustrate, if a case had one victim with one gunshot wound and no additional information on shots fired, then we set shots fired equal to one.
Our analysis focuses upon 239 incidents involving
pistols
and 104 incidents involving revolvers. We excluded 238 incidents
from analysis because the type of handgun was not clearly identified
in the police report. The analyzed and excluded cases had comparable
outcomes: 38.0% of the excluded cases and 34.9% of the analyzed
cases resulted in some form of gunshot injury, while 7.3% of the
excluded cases and 8.0% of the analyzed cases resulted in deaths.
These differences were statistically insignificant (2
p level >0.05). In addition, we excluded 11 cases involving
multiple handguns because we could not determine which gun(s) was
used in the shooting.
Although reporting officers and witnesses were able to identify the type of firearm (that is, pistol or revolver) used in the analyzed cases, the precise make and model of the handgun was not identified in most of these reports, often because police did not recover the gun used in the crime. Lack of specific gun model information precluded precise measurement of ammunition capacity for all but a very small number of gunfire incidents.
Following an approach similar to that used by Kleck in his national analysis of gun and non-gun assaults,26 we contrast pistol and revolver cases on a number of dichotomous outcome measures (that is, occurrence of gunfire, occurrence of gunshot injuries or deaths) and continuous outcome measures (that is, number of shots fired, number of wounded victims, number of wounds per gunshot victim) reflecting different stages of gun assaults. In so doing, we test whether gun attacks with pistols result in more shots fired than those committed with revolvers, leading to more gunshot victims and/or more severely wounded gunshot victims.
Because the data were collected originally for a study of trends
over time in wounds per gunshot victim,18,
19 only limited information was
recorded about the actors or circumstances beyond that noted above.
While staff did collect information on a few variables like victim
demographics (the victims were predominantly male and
African-American) and the number of perpetrators, they did not record
information on other potentially important variables, such as
offender characteristics or relationships among the actors,26,
27 in a systematic manner, if at all, because such
information was outside the scope of the original study and was
not always clear from the reports. And since the data were extracted
from the homicide and aggravated assault files, there were relatively
few known robberies or sexual assaults among the cases (which would
have generally appeared in separate case files), resulting in a more
homogeneous sample of assaultive incidents. For these reasons, and
because no prior study has examined the differential lethality and
injuriousness of assaults involving
pistols
and revolvers, we chose to conduct bivariate analyses. We present
2 tests of
association for dichotomous measures and t tests of group
means for continuous measures, using a probability level of 0.05 to
judge the statistical significance of results.
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RESULTS |
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,
assailants using
pistols
attacked victims in virtually the same proportion of cases as
assailants using revolvers (69.0% and 68.3%, respectively). This
implies that the type of gun used was not correlated with
characteristics of actors or circumstances that might affect the
probability of gunfire. In particular, it suggests that offenders
using
pistols were no more or less likely to attempt to
injure or kill their victims than were offenders using revolvers.
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).
In contrast, the average number of shots in revolver cases ranged
from 2.30 to 2.58. Using both minimum and maximum shots fired
estimates,
pistol
cases averaged about one more shot than did revolver cases, and this
difference was statistically significant in both sets of comparisons.
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shows that about two thirds (68.5%) of
pistol
cases but only about half (52.1%) of revolver cases involved multiple
shots according to the minimum shots fired estimates. Using the
maximum estimates, over three quarters (78.8%) of
pistol
cases and about two thirds (66.2%) of revolver cases involved
multiple shots. Ten to thirteen percent of
pistol
cases involved more than six shots, the most common ammunition
capacity for revolvers; in contrast, slightly less than 3% of
revolver cases involved more than six shots. Finally, 3.6% to 4.2% of
pistol
cases involved more than 10 shots, the current limit on newly
manufactured ammunition magazines.
Although
pistol
cases involved higher numbers of shots, they were not significantly
more likely to result in injuries (fatal or non-fatal) than were
revolver cases. Attackers killed or injured victims in 57.6% of
gunfire cases involving
pistols
and 56.3% of gunfire incidents involving revolvers (see figs 1
and 2).
However,
pistol
cases resulted in more wounded persons per incident than did revolver
cases. Among those incidents resulting in gunshot victims, nearly 12%
of the
pistol
incidents involved multiple victims in contrast to none of the
revolver incidents. As shown in table 2
(left panel), the average number of victims was 1.15 in
pistol
incidents and 1.0 in revolver incidents. Though statistically
significant, we should treat this finding cautiously because there
was no variation in the number of wounded victims in the revolver
cases (hence, the standard deviation was zero for revolver cases).
Nonetheless, it appears that injurious attacks with
pistols
produced 15% more gunshot victims than did those with revolvers.
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).
Yet our analysis suggests that only 95 persons would have been
wounded in those 95 incidents if the offenders had used revolvers
rather than
pistols.
This reduction of 14 gunshot victims would have reduced the overall
number of gunshot victims by 9.4% (14/(109+40)
x 100).
Finally, figs 1 and 2
show that gunshot injury incidents involving
pistols
were less likely to produce a death than were those involving
revolvers (15.8% to 25.0%). A number of factors such as gun caliber,
wound location, and the physical condition of the victim influence
whether a gunshot victim dies. The higher fatality rate among
revolver gunshot victims appears to have been linked, at least in
part, to factors like wound location and age (analyses not shown).
For example, 42.0% of the wounds sustained by revolver victims were
wounds to the head, chest or abdomen, in contrast to only 25.2% of
those sustained by
pistol
victims (wound location was known for 83.3% of the wounds inflicted
with revolvers and 87.7% of those inflicted with
pistols).
Also, 14.3% of revolver gunshot victims but only 3.7% of
pistol
gunshot victims were over age 35 (age was recorded for 87.5%
and 75.7% of revolver and
pistol
gunshot victims, respectively).
However, the key mechanism for a semiautomatic weaponry effect is
the number of wounds—that is, does the higher number of shots fired
in
pistol cases increase the likelihood that gunshot
victims will suffer multiple wounds, thereby making it more likely
that the victims will die? Table 2
(right panel) contrasts the number of gunshot wounds sustained by
victims in
pistol
and revolver cases. Although a higher percentage of
pistol
victims sustained multiple wounds (24.3% to 20% for
pistol
and revolver victims, respectively), the average number of wounds
for
pistol
victims (1.44) was actually lower than that for revolver victims
(1.50). However, neither of these differences was statistically
significant. Therefore, we would not expect victims shot with
pistols
to die more frequently than victims shot with revolvers, holding gun
caliber, wound location, the victim’s physical condition, and other
relevant factors constant.
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DISCUSSION |
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The results of this study should be qualified on a number of grounds. General limitations to the data were noted earlier. The shots fired variable was measured with less than optimal precision. Further, indicators of wounds per victim may be less accurate in police records than in medical records.
The effects of semiautomatics on gun attack outcomes could also be contingent on the particular models used; gun model identifications were usually missing in these data, thus precluding examination of ammunition capacity or gun quality. Note that a number of the pistol models used most frequently in crime are inexpensive, lower quality guns (often referred to as Saturday Night Specials) that are prone to jamming and often don’t have ammunition capacities larger than those of revolvers.28, 29
In addition, multivariate studies controlling for characteristics of actors and situations might yield different results if those characteristics tend to be related to both weapon selection and attack outcomes. If, for instance, pistol shooters in this study tended to be younger and/or less skilled shooters than revolver shooters, this might explain why the former fired more often yet didn’t injure or kill victims in a higher fraction of attacks and tended to hit victims in less vital areas of the body. Other potential confounders might include the nature of the circumstances (for example, whether the shooting was an execution-style shooting), the general health of the victim(s), the type of location (for example, indoor or outdoor location), the distance between the shooter and intended victim(s), and the presence of multiple persons who could have been shot intentionally or accidentally (as bystanders).
Taking the results at face value, nonetheless, this study has potential ramifications for national trends and policy, implying that the spread of pistols during the last few decades may have contributed modestly to higher levels of assaultive gun injuries. Hence, policies to restrict or discourage the use of semiautomatic weapons or restrict ammunition magazine capacity might have the potential to reduce gunshot injuries.
We should be cautious about these inferences, however, because the analyses did not support all of our hypotheses about the effects of pistols. Further, achieving the moderate impacts suggested by this study would require complete elimination of the use of pistols in crime; to the extent that policy falls short of achieving this goal, the benefits may be substantially less and difficult to measure. Finally, these results may not generalize well to other places, although the differential in shots fired between pistol and revolver cases seems consistent with that found in other research.7
This study provides a first step in assessing differential levels of injury and death from attacks committed with different types of handguns, and it may spur replications to determine if these results can be generalized to other places and whether characteristics of the situations and actors mediate the relationships between weapon types and attack outcomes. Further research into the dynamics and outcomes of gun attacks can help to both clarify the consequences of changes in the civilian firearm arsenal and assess the potential impact of gun control measures designed to restrict the availability of particular types of firearms.
Key points
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS |
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This research was supported by grants 1995-IJ-CX-0111 and 1998-IJ-CX-0039 from the National Institute of Justice (United States Department of Justice) to the Urban Institute. The Jerry Lee Center of Criminology, University of Pennsylvania and the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Maryland provided additional support. The authors wish to thank a number of persons for assistance: Michael Buerger conducted on-site data collection; Jeffrey Roth provided advice on research design; Garen Wintemute, Charles Wellford, and Robert Brame offered helpful comments on earlier versions of this work; and Lois Mock served as grant monitor to the project. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, the University of Maryland, the University of Pennsylvania, the United States Department of Justice, or any of the aforementioned individuals.
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