States can reduce gun deaths significantly by doing three things, a 2020 study suggests: limiting children's access to guns, restricting concealed-carry permits, and restricting 'stand your ground” policies.
Nearly 40,000 people were killed by firearms in the United States in 2018, but curbing these numbers has been a statistically tricky—and politically fraught—problem. Now, a study that tracked individual gun laws over time suggests states can reduce gun deaths significantly by doing three things: limiting children's access to guns, restricting concealed-carry permits, and restricting"stand your ground" policies.
U.S. gun laws vary considerably by state. Some, like Kansas, allow citizens to carry firearms in public and make it legal for gun owners to shoot an assailant in self-defense in some situations . Others, like California, are more restrictive, limiting not only who is allowed to carry guns in public, but also access to firearms in the home by requiring safety devices such as trigger locks or gun safes.
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.
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'sHowever, because the study looked at a relatively small subset of gun laws, more research is needed to adequately understand how different laws such as background checks and waiting periods impact gun deaths, Kaufman says.