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.

Published April 16 in the BMJ, our study 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 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.