How can gun control help

But they can prevent crimes or suicides with weapons owned by somebody else. They can also cut down on accidental shootings. According to the CDC, an average of people are shot to death unintentionally every year. Some gun owners worry that the technology will fail when they need it most, like during a home invasion.

Others fear government overreach. The mandate backfired, mobilizing opposition to smart guns from the firearms lobby and stunting investment in the technology. Gun owners boycotted, and sales plummeted. No major gun manufacturers have invested in the technology since. Support for smart guns, however, could be building. Gun violence received 5. There is a reason for this lack of knowledge. The message to researchers was clear: study the gun problem at your own risk.

In early March, the Rand Corp. Some states are trying to pick up the slack. Such investments are urgent as the failure to find answers carries a steep cost. Federal law offers the gun industry extraordinary protections. In , Congress passed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which shields gun manufacturers and sellers from civil claims brought by victims of gun violence.

No one benefits from frivolous lawsuits. But holding manufacturers liable for the misuse of their products, experts say, would incentivize them to make firearms safer. But here, nothing. Write to Sean Gregory at sean. By Sean Gregory and Chris Wilson. Related Stories. State gun laws requiring universal background checks for all gun sales resulted in homicide rates 15 percent lower than states without such laws. Laws prohibiting the possession of firearms by people who have been convicted of a violent crime were associated with an 18 percent reduction in homicide rates.

None of the state gun laws studied were found to be related to overall suicide rates. Universal background checks, which have long been a top priority for gun control advocates and policymakers in the United States, appear to have the biggest impact. Though there has been a push for federal gun regulations in recent years, the power to legislate gun sales and gun ownership is largely beholden to the states.

The average firearm homicide rate in states without background checks is 58 percent higher than the average in states with background-check laws in place. As of , only 13 states, including Massachusetts, had laws requiring universal background checks. The Brink asked Siegel to take us on a deeper dive into the findings of these two studies. Michael Siegel: There are numerous studies that have examined the effect of particular state firearm laws, but there are few studies, until now, that have investigated the impact of multiple state firearm laws at the same time, using the same statistical model.

Our goal was to assess the impact of multiple state laws using a single statistical model, while controlling for the presence of each of the other laws. One must examine the impact of each law while controlling for the presence of other laws. We did twice—once using death certificate data collected by the CDC and a second time using police-reported homicide data collected by the FBI.

Tight regulation of who has access to firearms, rather than the type of firearms that are allowed, differentiates states with the lowest rates of homicides.

What surprised us the most was that in states that enacted a combination of universal background-check laws, laws prohibiting the sale of guns to people with violent misdemeanors, and concealed carry permit laws, the homicide rates were 35 percent lower than in states with none of those three kinds of laws.

The practice of keeping guns out of the hands of people who are at the greatest risk for violence—based on a history of violence—appears to be the most closely associated with decreased rates of firearm homicide. We also found that certain laws appear to be more effective depending on location.

That makes sense because the nature of urban crime is somewhat different, and the populations in urban vs. In large cities with more than , people, we found background checks were even more effective at reducing rates of gun-related deaths than they were in suburban or rural areas. In contrast, we found that violent misdemeanor laws were more effective at reducing homicide rates in suburban and rural areas than they were in large cities. Permit requirements were robustly effective regardless of location.

This is suggestive that applying a cluster of different types of state laws is necessary, because not every law will work the same for each local population. Can you explain the relationship between two types of laws you found to reduce homicide rates: universal background checks and laws prohibiting possession of firearms by people with past records of violence, aka violent misdemeanor laws?

In a sense, universal background checks are the basic platform upon which you can effectively implement restrictions on who has access to a gun. States need to have two types of laws to be effective: first, restrictions on who can access a gun; and second, universal background checks so that you know whether a prospective buyer is subject to those restrictions.

Laws regulating the sale of assault weapons are unlikely to have a large impact on homicide rates, because these weapons are used in only a very small proportion of homicides. The vast majority of firearm homicides in the United States are committed with handguns.

In contrast, laws that restrict access to firearms among those people who are at the greatest risk for violence—namely, people with a history of violence—are intervening among a subpopulation of people who are likely to commit crimes. In other words, you are intervening in the most focused way possible—that is, in high-risk situations.

These bans are most often based on characteristics of guns that are not directly tied to their lethality. In contrast, requiring universal background checks in all 50 states could have a substantial impact on gun violence because it would essentially set a minimum standard across the nation—that standard being very simply that people purchasing a gun need to be checked to see if they have a history that puts them at high risk for violence.

Public health advocates need to set priorities in terms of what policies are the most critical to enact. In fact, the primary purpose of our policy brief was to review the existing research and provide data on multiple laws in order to inform public health advocates and policymakers on this issue. I believe that the three most important things that lawmakers can do to reduce gun violence in their home states are to pass laws that: one, require universal background checks; two, prohibit gun purchase or possession by anyone with a history of violence, whether it be a felony or a misdemeanor; and three, provide a mechanism, called red flag laws, to address people who are at an extreme risk of committing violence, not only to other people but to themselves.

Massachusetts is one of the few states—also including California, New York, and New Jersey—that has a comprehensive set of laws regulating firearms. In the city of Boston, in certain neighborhoods, gun violence is a problem.

We need to address that. But on the whole, the state does have strong laws. Do you think this type of law would be effective? In the case of the Dayton shooter, we know that this is a person who should have been flagged as someone not able to possess a firearm. This individual made threats to kill and sexually assault high school classmates, he had a hit list with names written out. The principal and local law enforcement knew about it. So when someone does threaten violence, they should not have access to a gun.

This article was updated with new information on August 6, The original version of this article was published on March 29, Jessica Colarossi is a science writer for The Brink. She graduated with a BS in journalism from Emerson College in , with focuses on environmental studies and publishing.

While a student, she interned at ThinkProgress in Washington, D. Kat J. Boston University moderates comments to facilitate an informed, substantive, civil conversation. Abusive, profane, self-promotional, misleading, incoherent or off-topic comments will be rejected. Moderators are staffed during regular business hours EST and can only accept comments written in English.

Statistics or facts must include a citation or a link to the citation. BU Student: I completely agree. The only way to sell disarming the police is to also disarm the general population. To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. Does gun control help reduce gun deaths? It's a crucially important question in light of the horrible news out of Texas , but even for PhDs, it's a tough one. There's been a mountain of research on the subject, but these dozens of studies conducted over many years and in many different countries reach a broad and sometimes contradictory range of conclusions.

It's hard to know what it really tells us, taken together, about whether gun laws can reduce gun violence. A study, published in the academic journal Epidemiologic Reviews , seeks to resolve this problem. It systematically reviewed the evidence from around the world on gun laws and gun violence, looking to see if the best studies come to similar conclusions.

It was the first such study to look at the international research in this way. The authors are careful to note that their findings do not conclusively prove that gun restrictions reduce gun deaths. However, they did find a compelling trend whereby new restrictions on gun purchasing and ownership tended to be followed by a decline in gun deaths. Most of them looked at law changes in the developed world, such as the US, Australia, and Austria, while a few looked at gun laws in developing countries, specifically Brazil and South Africa.

This isn't, then, a study that compiled its own original data on one specific gun law. It's actually more valuable than that: It's telling us what all the different studies on individual laws say when you examine them put together. So what do Santaella-Tenorio et al. First, and most importantly, that gun violence declined after countries pass a raft of gun laws at the same time: "The simultaneous implementation of laws targeting multiple firearms restrictions is associated with reductions in firearm deaths," the study finds.

This finding doesn't highlight one specific law, like an assault weapon ban, in isolation. There were "so many different kinds of laws," Santaella-Tenorio told me, that it was hard to make good international comparisons on every specific kind of gun restriction.

Rather, countries passed big packages of gun laws, which overhauled the nation's firearm code fairly broadly, which all tended to share similar features. According to Santaella-Tenorio, they generally included:. South Africa's comprehensive Firearm Control Act, passed in , contained all these measures. One study found that firearm homicides in five major South African cities decreased by Austria's firearm law, similarly, required background checks, limited access to powerful firearms, and imposed rules about how gun owners had to store their guns.

Santaella-Tenorio reviewed two studies on Austria's law, both of which found evidence that the law had reduced deaths. According to one of them, firearm homicides went down by 4. Australia's National Firearms Agreement which outright confiscated , guns, in addition to imposing background checks and licensing rules is perhaps the best-studied of any of the international laws.

Santaella-Tenorio et al. One study, for example, compared the Australian state of Victoria to others around the country. Victoria had passed a raft of firearm restrictions in , so the NFA didn't change policy there that much.