Armed to Kill: A Cross-Sectional Analysis Examining the Links between Firearms Availability, Gun Control, and Terrorism Using the Global Terrorism Database and the Small Arms Survey

ABSTRACTAccording to the Global Terrorism Database, the use of firearms in terrorist attacks has been on the rise, and firearms-based attacks are the most lethal. In the aftermath of mass-casualty attacks perpetrated with firearms, policymakers across the world advocate tightened gun control to restrict terrorists’ access to both licit and illicit guns. However, academic research on the linkages between firearms availability, gun control legislation, and terrorism is scarce. This study fills this research gap by conducting a systematic cross-sectional analysis of the linkage between gun control, licit and illicit stocks of firearms, and terrorist attacks in 2015–2019, based on a novel dataset incorporating the Global Terrorism Database and the Small Arms Survey. Our estimation using OLS regression shows a strong relationship between the availability of firearms and the incidence of gun-based terrorism, especially for lone wolf attacks. Furthermore, terrorists in stable, democratic countries are comparatively more likely to select firearms as their weapon of choice. Conversely, strict gun control only slightly alleviates the overall risk of terrorism in stable countries but does not impact weapon selection. In unstable countries in the grip of intrastate conflict, gun control significantly reduces lone wolf-style attacks, while organized multi-perpetrator attacks are not deterred.KEYWORDS: Firearmsgunsterrorismlone wolfmass-casualtylegislationcontrolregulationpolitical violencesecuritypublic policyquantitativeregression Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Supplementary materialSupplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2023.2259506.Notes1. Includes all incidents regardless of doubt perpetrated between September 1, 2001 and December 31, 2019. More recent data was not available at the time of the search (June 2022). A lower casualty threshold of at least ten people killed or injured per attack adds 3068 more attacks involving use of firearms in this time period.2. According to the U.K.’s most senior counter-terrorism police officer, “Half of the terrorist plots that have been disrupted in recent years have involved terrorist plotters who tried to get hold of guns.” May Bulman, “Police Fear Terrorists Buying Guns for Paris-Style Attack on UK,” The Independent, October 31, 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/mi5-chief-andrew-parker-foiled-terror-plots-guns-attack-latest-firearms-extremist-paris-attack-a7389891.html. While most of these foiled plots are naturally undocumented, some have been covered in the press and policy reports, e.g. the terrorist attack with firearms that was foiled on the Thalys train between Brussels and Paris in August 2015. Nils Duquet and Kevin Goris, “Firearms Acquisition by Terrorists in Europe,” Findings and Policy Recommendations of Project SAFTE (Brussels: Flemish Peace Institute, April 18, 2018), 53.3. According to the data in Global Terrorism Database, firearms, along with various types of explosives have been the dominant weapon types employed in terrorist attacks worldwide. To give one specific example, following the 1998 Good Friday Peace Agreement, the IRA decommissioned approximately ninety handguns, 1000 mainly Kalashnikov-type assault rifles, and twenty to thirty heavy machine guns, two tons of Semtex, seven surface-to-air missiles, seven flame throwers, 1200 detonators, eleven rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and 100+ grenades. BBC News, “IRA Guns: The List of Weapons,” September 26, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/4284048.stm.4. Duquet and Goris, “Firearms Acquisition by Terrorists in Europe.”5. Robert A. Tessler, Stephen J. Mooney, Cordelie E. Witt, Kathleen O’Connell, Jessica Jenness, Monica S. Vavilala, and Frederick P. Rivara, “Use of Firearms in Terrorist Attacks: Differences Between the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand,” JAMA Internal Medicine 177, no. 12 (2017): 1865–68, https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2017.5723.6. “TE-SAT 2013: EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report” (Hague: Europol, April 25, 2013), https://www.europol.europa.eu/activities-services/main-reports/te-sat-2013-eu-terrorism-situation-and-trend-report; “TE-SAT 2015: EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report” (Hague: Europol, July 6, 2015), https://www.europol.europa.eu/activities-services/main-reports/european-union-terrorism-situation-and-trend-report-2015.7. Carl Bialik, “Terrorists Are Turning to Guns More Often in U.S. Attacks,” FiveThirtyEight (blog), June 12, 2016, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/terrorists-are-turning-to-guns-more-often-in-u-s-attacks/.8. Brian Michael Jenkins, “The New Age of Terrorism,” in The McGraw-Hill Homeland Security Handbook, ed. David Kamien, 1st ed. (McGraw-Hill Education, 2005), 119.9. Jeffrey D. Simon, Lone Wolf Terrorism: Understanding the Growing Threat. Reprint (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2016).10. Duquet and Goris, “Firearms Acquisition by Terrorists in Europe.”11. Eran Shor, “Counterterrorist Legislation and Subsequent Terrorism: Does It Work?” Social Forces 95, no. 2 (2016): 525–57, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/sow052.12. For useful literature reviews See Harvard Injury Control Research Center, “Homicide,” August 27, 2012, https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/; RAND, “What Science Tells Us About the Effects of Gun Policies,” April 22, 2020, https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/key-findings/what-science-tells-us-about-the-effects-of-gun-policies.html.13. D. Hemenway and M. Miller, “Firearm Availability and Homicide Rates Across 26 High-Income Countries,” The Journal of Trauma 49, no. 6 (2000): 985–88, https://doi.org/10.1097/00005373-200012000-00001.14. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “Global Study on Homicide: Understanding Homicide,” Vienna, July 2019, https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/gsh/Booklet_3.pdf.15. For many less-developed countries, UNODC data is available for a single year for the 2015-2019 period, if at all. This is particularly acute for unstable countries. For example, out of forty-two countries undergoing one or more intrastate conflicts, only twenty-four have any homicide data available.16. This shortage of peer reviewed academic studies contracts with the plethora of newspaper articles and various on-line publications on the topic, which tend to mushroom in the aftermath of major terrorist attacks perpetrated with guns.17. 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Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, “Small Arms Survey—Global Firearms Holdings” (Geneva, June 18, 2018), http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/weapons-and-markets/tools/global-firearms-holdings.html.24. Alan B. Krueger and Jitka Maleckova, “Education, Poverty and Terrorism: Is There a Causal Connection?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 17, no. 4 (2003): 119–44; Alan B. Krueger, What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Lai, “‘Draining the Swamp’”; Piazza, “Rooted in Poverty?”; Robison et al., “Ideologies of Violence.”25. Quan Li and Drew Schaub, “Economic Globalization and Transnational Terrorism: A Pooled Time-Series Analysis,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 48, no. 2 (2004): 230–58, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002703262869; Gassebner and Luechinger, “Lock, Stock, and Barrel.”26. Gassebner and Luechinger, “Lock, Stock, and Barrel.”27. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), “SIPRI Military Expenditure Database,” 2022, https://www.sipri.org/databases/milex.28. Erica Chenoweth, “Terrorism and Democracy,” Annual Review of Political Science 16, no. 1 (2013): 355–78, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-032211-221825; Lai, “‘Draining the Swamp’”; James A. Piazza, “Repression and Terrorism: A Cross-National Empirical Analysis of Types of Repression and Domestic Terrorism,” Terrorism and Political Violence 29, no. 1 (2017): 102–18, https://doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2014.994061; James I. Walsh and James A. Piazza, “Why Respecting Physical Integrity Rights Reduces Terrorism,” Comparative Political Studies 43, no. 5 (2010): 551–77, https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414009356176.29. Michael Coppedge, John Gerring, Staffan Lindberg, Svend Skaaning, Jan Teorell, David Altman, and Michael Bernhard, “The V-Dem Dataset 2021,” 2021, https://www.v-dem.net/vdemds.html.30. Burgoon, “On Welfare and Terror”; Michael G. Findley and Joseph K. Young, “Terrorism and Civil War: A Spatial and Temporal Approach to a Conceptual Problem,” Perspectives on Politics 10, no. 2 (2012): 285–305, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592712000679; Gassebner and Luechinger, “Lock, Stock, and Barrel”; Lai, “‘Draining the Swamp’”; Piazza, “Repression and Terrorism”; Walsh and Piazza, “Why Respecting Physical Integrity.”31. Nils Peter Gleditsch, Peter Wallensteen, Mikael Eriksson, Margareta Sollenberg, and Havard Strand, “Armed Conflict 1946–2001: A New Dataset,” Journal of Peace Research 39, no. 5 (2002): 615–37, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343302039005007.32. Ralph Sundberg, Kristine Eck, and Joakim Kreutz, “Introducing the UCDP Non-State Conflict Dataset,” Journal of Peace Research 49, no. 2 (2012): 351–62, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343311431598.33. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “Global Study on Homicide.”34. Mark Galeotti and Anna Arutunyan, “Peace and Proliferation: The Russo-Ukrainian War and the Illegal Arms Trade” (Geneva: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, March 2023), https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/russia-ukraine-war-illegal-arms-trade/.Additional informationFundingThis publication is the result of Metropolitan University Prague research project no. 100-4 “Centre for Security Studies,” which was conducted under a grant from the Institutional Fund for the Long-term Strategic Development of Research Organisations, Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, Czech Republic.Notes on contributorsOldrich BuresOldrich Bures is the founding director of the Center for Security Studies and Professor of International Political Relations at Metropolitan University Prague and Visiting Professor at University of South Wales.Alexander BurilkovAlexander Burilkov is a research associate at Leuphana University of Lüneburg and External Research Fellow at the Center for Security Studies, Metropolitan University Prague.