The town of Roxbury was rocked last week when a local firefighter was arrested and charged with setting fire to a vacant building. Joseph R. Gallant, 26, was accused of setting fire to a building just down the street from his Roxbury home.

While certainly unusual, the idea of a firefighter turned firebug is not without precedent. A Google search reveals hundreds of examples, spread across the U.S., of firefighters accused and convicted of arson.

In 2003, for instance, three large wildfires – in Colorado, Arizona and California – were set by three separate firefighter/arsonists.

Some of the most notorious serial arsonists have been firefighters. In 1987, investigators arrested John Orr, himself an arson investigator and fire captain in southern California. Orr once set fires in three towns on his way home from a statewide meeting of arson investigators.

Yet, despite the volume of news stories about firefighters setting fires, experts seem divided on the central question: Are firefighters more likely than ordinary people to commit arson?

A New York Times story in 2003 was headlined, “Do Firefighters Like to Set Fires? Just an Urban Legend, Experts Say.”

The reporter said forensic experts who study arsonists find no evidence to support the notion that firefighters are more likely than other groups of people to set fires.

Dr. David J. Icove, an arson expert, told The Times that “firefighters are no more drawn to arson than police officers are to crime.”

Hmm … not very reassuring.

Yet, a CBS report in 2003 found just the opposite, that small, rural, volunteer fire departments regularly produce arsonists.

According to the CBS broadcast, 75 percent of the firefighters in the U.S. are volunteers. The departments they join are often desperate for help, eager for new members and do not screen them carefully.

The arsonists are usually young men, often eager to prove themselves, or simply eager for the excitement and control that comes from setting fires.

Sometimes their motives are even more straightforward: Volunteers have been known to set fires because they are paid stipends or hourly wages for responding.

Yet it may be impossible to truly know whether firefighters are more likely to set fires. Of the more than 70,000 suspicious fires in a given year, only 16 percent result in arrests, and only 2 percent in convictions.

And the odds are good that people who know how to battle fires are also the best at baffling arson investigators.