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11 March 2016

Could three gun laws cut US firearm deaths by 90 per cent?

A study has found that just three US laws could greatly reduce firearm deaths, but critics say the findings only highlight the urgent need for more research

Close-up of someone's hand taking out some copper-coloured, mean-looking pointy bullets from a case
Extending background checks to cover ammunition sales would help reduce firearms mortality

Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Getty Images

Most of the laws aimed at gun control in the US don’t work. But three do. Implement them at a national level, and we could cut firearm deaths by 90 per cent.


There are more than 33,000 firearm deaths each year in the US. Yet no one knows which, if any, laws are effective in reducing this number. This is partly due to lack of research. In the 1990s, Congress passed a bill that was worded in such a way as to prevent national funding bodies from supporting research could be seen as advocating gun control. President Barack Obama has since tried to clarify the language in order to encourage more research, but firearms researchers still feel they are being ostracised. Many national funding bodies have not funded any gun research in years.


Too many loopholes

Several federal gun laws control the manufacture, buying and selling of firearms in the US. The Brady Bill, for example, requires that people who buy firearms from licensed dealers must undergo background checks. But there are loopholes – gun shows and private sales are exempt from these restrictions. Individual states can also implement their own laws, which vary widely.

“State laws can widen or close the gaps in the Brady law,” says Bindu Kalesan at Boston University. For example, while some states impose additional restrictions, such as banning assault weapons, others have enacted “stand your ground” laws that allow people to shoot in self-defence, without a duty to first retreat from any danger – which is stipulated in federal law for certain scenarios.

With no funding, Kalesan and her colleagues set out to assess the effectiveness of state gun laws in their spare time. The team collected data on firearm deaths between 2008 and 2010, as well as information from 25 state laws and unemployment levels. They created a computer model to assess all these factors, and tease apart the relationships between specific laws and gun deaths.

According to the model, most laws are ineffective in reducing gun crime. “They might be plugging small holes when you have a really big leak somewhere else,” she says. “They really don’t work.”

Background checks on gun buyers

Three laws did seem to lower gun deaths, however. Extending background checks to cover the purchase of ammunition, bringing in background checks on private sales, and using “fingerprinting” technology that allows a bullet to be traced to the weapon that fired it, all seem to be linked to a significant reduction in mortality. “If we implemented these laws at the federal level, firearm mortality would drop by 90 per cent,” says Kalesan.

Other researchers aren’t so sure. Garen Wintemute at the University of California, Davis, says that many of the laws that the team assessed depend on continuing enforcement to be effective, and there is no measurement of that in the study.

It is impossible to measure the effect of a law when you don’t know if or how it was enforced, he says.

Jeffrey Swanson at Duke University in North Carolina says there are too many influencing factors to just look at the laws in isolation. A better approach would be to assess people and their individual risk of involvement in violence, he says, rather than states as a whole.

Child-proof locks

One aspect of the study suggests that laws relating to children – such as those that ensure child-proof locks are placed on firearms – actually increase mortality. This just doesn’t make sense, says Swanson.

Neither does the association between bullet fingerprinting and lower gun crime, he says, because although three states have implemented a law stating that all new guns should be equipped with the technology, firearms manufacturers have yet to put them into practice.

Perhaps it isn’t surprising that research done on a shoestring budget is less than perfect. Thorough research requires time and money. If anything, the study highlights how desperately needed such research is, given that firearm mortality represents a huge public health crisis in the US.

“This study comes to misleading conclusions,” says Swanson. He worries that the findings could be misinterpreted by those who are against restrictive gun laws. A shallow reading of the study could lead someone to conclude that many restrictive gun laws actually increase firearm mortality – which is unlikely to reflect the truth. “Investment in research needs to match the gravity of the situation,” he says. “I’m a strong supporter of research in this field, but you have to do it right.”

Journal reference: The Lancet, DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(15)01026-0

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