The Striking Relationship Between Gun Safety Laws and Firearm Deaths

Just this morning, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill that would make it a federal crime to traffic guns (one of four gun control bills being discussed by the committee). This comes on the heels of an important new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine that documents the strong connection between stricter gun control laws and lower rates of gun deaths at the state level.

The study, by researchers at Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and Harvard School of Public Health, uses a measure of state-by-state "legislative strength" of gun control policies tracked by the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, including measures to: (1) curb firearm trafficking; (2) strengthen background checks on purchasers of firearms beyond those required by the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act; (3) ensure child safety; (4) ban military style assault weapons; and (5) restrict guns in public places. It conducted a detailed statistical analysis (via a clustered Poisson regression) to examine the effect gun control laws on firearms fatalities.