RESEARCHERS CLAIM 3 TYPES OF GUN LAWS CAN CUT DEATHS BY 10%

A new study in the US, which saw 40,000 dying of gunshots in 2018, has shown that three gun laws can cut the number of fatalities by limiting children’s access to guns, restricting concealed-carry permits, and restricting “stand your ground” policies, Michael Price wrote for Science on June 15, 2020.

This patchwork—combined with limited funding for research—has made it hard for scientists to predict the effects of gun laws on gun deaths, says Terry Schell, a senior behavioral scientist at the nonprofit RAND Corp., which aims to improve public policy through research and analysis. To limit these problems, Schell and colleagues focused on just three kinds of laws and one outcome: gun deaths per capita. To understand how laws affect death rates, they screened hundreds of existing and novel statistical approaches, finally zeroing in on a model that reduces statistical noise by paying special attention to how different variables affect deaths year by year, rather than averaged over long periods of time.

The researchers counted the number of gun deaths from all 50 states for each year from 1980 to 2016. They then examined each instance of a new law limiting or allowing the right to carry, stand your ground, or child access, state by state, through 2013. Finally, they compared that with mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for the next 6 years.

On average, establishing right-to-carry and stand your ground laws resulted in a slight uptick in annual gun deaths, about 3% for each law, the team reported in the   Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on June 17, 2020. Creating laws aimed at making it harder for children to get their hands on guns—say, by requiring parents to keep guns in safes—reduced gun deaths by an average of 6%. States that enacted strict child access laws, make it illegal to carry a gun in public without a permit, and don’t have a stand your ground law could expect to see an 11% reduction in annual gun deaths, according to the new model. Eight states presently have that constellation of laws—California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Rhode Island—and six of those states are in the bottom 10 for per capita gun deaths, according to CDC’s state-by-state firearms mortality data.