This nested case-control study examines individual, firearm, and purchasing characteristics associated with risk of firearm-related violent crime arrest.
This study describes individual, firearm, and transaction characteristics of purchasers in California who were arrested for a firearm-related violent crime (FRV) as compared to the general population of registered purchasers in the state. The researchers found several transaction and firearm features were associated with risk of FRV. Notably, these features provided little evidence of additional risk for those with a prior criminal record. Firearm purchasing records offer a potentially important administrative data source to identify individuals at elevated risk of perpetrating firearm violence. Relying on a dataset of all individuals with transaction records in California (1996–2021), linked to criminal records (1980–2021), the authors enrolled a cohort of individuals for whom they could capture the legal firearm purchase history. The authors identified those arrested for FRV post purchase, and using incidence density sampling, gender-matched cases to ten purchasers (controls) who remained “at risk” at the time the case was arrested. The authors focused on the purchase closest in time prior to the arrest (“index” purchase) and implemented conditional logistic regression and included models with controls for individual- and community-level demographics, as well as interactions between firearm and purchasing characteristics and criminal history. The cohort included 1,212,144 individuals, of whom 6153 were arrested for FRV (0.5%). Cases were matched to 61,530 controls to form the study sample. The largest risk factor was a prior criminal history. Several transaction and firearm characteristics were also associated with FRV. In the interaction models, most of the purchase and firearm features only remained significant among those with no criminal history. (Published Abstract Provided)