STATE GUN LEGISLATION STRENGTH AND KILLINGS BY LAW ENFORCEMENT: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF THE DANGER PERCEPTION THEORY

Abstract

The Danger Perception Theory hypothesizes that the use of lethal force by a law enforcement officer can be explained by the level of threat (real or perceived) that an individual officer feels during an encounter. With firearms being ubiquitous throughout the country, I theorize that a state’s gun law permissiveness may contribute to an officer’s perception of “threat” by increasing the probability that a citizen will have a firearm during any given encounter. Using the strength of gun legislation as a proxy for the level of threat an officer might feel, this thesis aims to empirically test the Danger Perception Theory. This thesis uses three years of data (2017 - 2019) from Mapping Police Violence, a crowd-sourced database that tracks police killings, and the legislative scorecards given by Gifford’s Law Center that measures the strength of state gun legislation, to look at individual state variations and test the Danger Perception Theory (DPT). States were matched on thirteen demographic, social, and economic variables, and states that fit the criteria of falling within one standard deviation on each variable and being contiguous with each other, were compared to see if they aligned with the DPT by showing a higher Gifford’s score and a lower rate of police killing per million residents. Using an equal-tailed Jeffrey’s prior interval, two confidence intervals were constructed for each of the three years to find the probability of support for the DPT. None of the tests conducted were statistically significant, but while the tests lacked statistical significance, the results show a pattern of state that tend to follow the reasoning of the DPT, following the conclusions drawn in previous literature on the topic. These findings suggest that more research is needed in this area, specifically analyzing a greater number of comparable two-state comparisons, could strengthen the argument for (or against) the DPT. This thesis adds to the literature suggesting that a possible avenue for reducing the rate of police killings could be in gun legislation.