--- title: Gun Injuries of All Kinds Go Up During Hunting Season description: "The start of hunting season poses gun injury risks outside of hunting," write Christopher Worsham, Charles Bray, and Anupam Jena. canonical: https://time.com/7277814/gun-injuries-hunting-season-essay/ author: TIME article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2025-04-16T22:30:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-19T07:51:40.117Z article:section: Ideas og:title: Gun Injuries of All Kinds Go Up During Hunting Season og:description: "The start of hunting season poses gun injury risks outside of hunting," write Christopher Worsham, Charles Bray, and Anupam Jena. og:url: https://time.com/7277814/gun-injuries-hunting-season-essay/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltffe0db437829ee45/6998c5d593610cea53c2f8e7/GettyImages-1171148583.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2046 og:image:height: 1151 og:image:alt: deer og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Gun Injuries of All Kinds Go Up During Hunting Season twitter:description: "The start of hunting season poses gun injury risks outside of hunting," write Christopher Worsham, Charles Bray, and Anupam Jena. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltffe0db437829ee45/6998c5d593610cea53c2f8e7/GettyImages-1171148583.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Gun Injuries of All Kinds Go Up During Hunting Season > Sponsored content. 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A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-inside-2026q3/newsletters?i=4dc1d8ee-a46a-4b0c-b965-863bb9eabae4&cr=time-nl-inside-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Gun Injuries Go Up During Hunting Season [Watch (HLS stream): Gun Injuries Go Up During Hunting Season](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/bmjdJar9.m3u8) (2:53)  _Published 2025-04-16. About half of Americans have a gun in the home, and hunting is a major reason why. When hunting season rolls around each fall, guns suddenly become more visible: hunters take firearms out of storage, clean and maintain them, and go to the store to purchase more guns and ammunition. As researchers, we wondered if this has any effect on gun injuries: not just during hunting, but overall. To our surprise, it did—in a big way._ by [Christopher M. Worsham](https://time.com/author/7198766/), [Charles Bray](https://time.com/author/charles-f-bray/) and [Anupam Jena](https://time.com/author/anupam-b-jena/) Apr 16, 2025 10:30 PM UTC About half of Americans have a gun in the home, and hunting is a major reason why. When hunting season rolls around each fall, guns suddenly become more visible: hunters take firearms out of storage, clean and maintain them, and go to the store to purchase more guns and ammunition. As researchers, we wondered if this has any effect on gun injuries: not just during hunting, but overall. To our surprise, it did—in a big way. by [Christopher M. Worsham](https://time.com/author/7198766/), [Charles Bray](https://time.com/author/charles-f-bray/) and [Anupam Jena](https://time.com/author/anupam-b-jena/) Apr 16, 2025 10:30 PM UTC About [half](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/24/key-facts-about-americans-and-guns/) of Americans have a gun in the home, and [hunting is a major reason why](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/24/key-facts-about-americans-and-guns/). When hunting season rolls around each fall, guns suddenly become more visible: hunters take firearms out of storage, clean and maintain them, and go to the store to purchase more guns and ammunition. As researchers, we wondered if this has any effect on gun injuries: not just during hunting, but overall. To our surprise, it did—in a big way. Published April 16 in the _BMJ_, our [study](https://time.com/7277814/gun-injuries-hunting-season-essay/) of four consecutive deer-hunting seasons used data from the Gun Violence Archive, which records firearm incidents from police reports and news outlets and has proven [useful](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2805517) for epidemiological study. We looked at different types of firearm incidents across both rural and urban settings. Despite hunting being an activity that is often associated with rural communities, about 75% of deer hunters actually live within metropolitan areas. We found that across 10 states, the start of deer hunting season was associated with an uptick in overall firearm incidents—about a 12.3% increase from baseline. There was, not surprisingly, a 566% uptick in hunting-related firearm incidents, but despite this enormous increase, these were still quite rare compared to other incident types. **Read More**: [_Could the Shingles Vaccine Help Prevent Dementia?_](https://time.com/7275048/shingles-vaccine-dementia-christopher-worsham-anupam-jena/) Importantly, there were increases in several more common types of firearm incidents not related to hunting, including suicide (11.1% increase), alcohol or substance use related incidents (87.5% increase), defensive use (27.8% increase), domestic violence (27.4% increase), home invasion/robbery (30.4% increase), and incidents related to appropriate licensure to carry a gun (19.4% increase). We saw no significant increases in incidents involving children or police officers. Our study’s findings were consistent with a similar study focusing on [rural counties](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2822218). Both studies have two important implications. The first is that hunting season may be accompanied by broader risks of injury that have not been well appreciated. Gun injuries related to hunting are to be expected, but our study underscores that the increased availability of firearms at the start of hunting season may also increase the risks of gun injuries unrelated to hunting, including suicide and violent crime. **Read More**: [_The New CDC Study on Vaccines and Autism Should Take a Radical Approach_](https://time.com/7272138/cdc-study-vaccines-autism-adversarial-collaboration-essay/) While our study found increases in gun injuries at the start of hunting season, the time to build awareness of the issue and to prepare is much sooner. In addition to basic [safe handling practices](https://www.atf.gov/firearms/learn-about-firearms-safety-and-security#Basic%20Firearms%20Safety) like treating every firearm as if it was loaded, some of the [recommended strategies](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra2306867) to prevent injury include the use of various locks and lockboxes, firearm disassembly, storage out of the home at the location where they are to be used (e.g. shooting range), and separating ammunition until it is to be used. Cable locks–which may be less effective than other methods but are better than nothing–may be available to firearm owners at [no cost](https://www.tn.gov/safety/tnhp/handgun/safestore.html). The second implication of our study relates to the broader, sometimes contested question of how the availability of guns impacts gun-related injuries. The best quality evidence on this question comes from “natural experiments” that identify circumstances in which the availability of guns or access to them sharply changes. For example, in the months following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting—which occurred at an arbitrary time with respect to the availability of firearms and risk of firearm-related incidents—an [estimated](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aan8179) 3 million additional firearms were sold in the U.S., corresponding to an estimated 57 to 66 additional accidental gun-related deaths. Because firearms suddenly increase in availability and access in the lead up to hunting season, a similar opportunity occurs to study what happens with firearm incidents—both hunting andnon-hunting related. Firearm safety is a priority for both gun owners and Americans more broadly. Recognizing that the start of hunting season poses gun injury risks outside of hunting may make that time of year a little bit safer. ## Transcript Chris, we had a new study come out this week in the BMJ that we wrote about in time magazine, which showed that at the start of hunting season in the United States, there is an increase in overall gun injuries. It happens in two places. The first is hunting injuries. That's not surprising. But the second thing, which is more surprising, is that there's an increase in gun injuries not related to hunting. So things like suicide, domestic violence, which to me, I think to us is a more surprising finding. Here was our idea. If we just looked at what happened to firearm incidents in a single state in a single hunting season, it's hard to learn too much about what's going on. But if we were to look at a bunch of states over a number of years, we can start to get a sense of some of the patterns here. So what we did was we combined firearm incidents across ten states over four years, looking at what happened just around the beginning of hunting season, when hunters are getting out their firearms, maintaining them, cleaning them, taking them out to go hunting. And we compared that to the number of firearm incidents in the time period surrounding the beginning of hunting season, when guns are kind of less common in the community. I think the two take home findings are just to give you some numbers. If you look at gun injuries related to hunting, they go up by about 500%. So it's very large. Not surprising. What's more surprising to me, though, is that if you look at things like suicide, domestic Violence, defensive use. Those things on average go up by about 12%. And for some of those categories they go up by even more. So again, it's this interesting finding where this increase in the availability and access to firearms at the start of hunting season seems to correspond not just to increase in hunting related gun injuries, but non hunting gun injuries as well. And all of this begs the question what should we do about all of this? You know, something like 11 million Americans go hunting every year. It's a really big pastime for folks. And a lot of hunters take firearm safety really seriously. So it seems like if the rest of the community, while guns are more out and about, we're taking firearm safety as seriously as most hunters do. Maybe we could avoid some of these incidents. I think that's right. And the the other sort of takeaway from this study for me is that there is this interest and debate about the relationship between the availability of firearms and things like violent crime. And it's hard to study because what you really need is this period where there's a sharp change in the availability of firearms. And in this particular case, we have that because that's what happens at the start of hunting season. 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