While the Republican Party ruminates on the best ways to not do anything about gun violence while collecting big checks from “Second Amendment” groups like the NRA, other people are trying their hardest to prove that there are ways in which we can legislate more public safety. There have been many studies over the years that point to how certain kinds of gun laws, or lack thereof, can lead to increases and decreases in various forms of gun-related violence. Two recently published studies point to decreases in violent firearm homicides and suicides in connection to gun laws.
NPR highlights both studies, one dealing with “red flag” laws, which take firearms away from people on a temporary basis if those people being perceived as a threat. The other study examined gun permit laws requiring handgun purchasers to have a license before buying a gun.
In the first study, “red flag” laws, which were brought up after school shootings as a potential way of getting guns away from “disturbed” people, seem to actually have a positive affect on preventing firearm suicides more than actual mass shootings. Aaron Kivisto is a clinical psychologist studying gun violence prevention, and he reports in his study, “Effects of Risk-Based Firearm Seizure Laws in Connecticut and Indiana on Suicide Rates, 1981–2015,” that risk-based seizure laws saved a lot of people from making the quick judgement to end their life with a firearm.
Indiana’s firearm seizure law was associated with a 7.5% reduction in firearm suicides in the ten years following its enactment, an effect specific to suicides with firearms and larger than that seen in any comparison state by chance alone. Enactment of Connecticut’s law was associated with a 1.6% reduction in firearm suicides immediately after its passage and a 13.7% reduction in firearm suicides in the post–Virginia Tech period, when enforcement of the law substantially increased. Regression-based sensitivity analyses showed that these findings were robust to alternative specifications. Whereas Indiana demonstrated an aggregate decrease in suicides, Connecticut’s estimated reduction in firearm suicides was offset by increased nonfirearm suicides.
Kivisto told NPR that he felt the early “soft” data on Connecticut says more about how little the new seizure laws were employed and less about their effectiveness, as the increase in reduced firearm suicides increased considerably after the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings, when the seizure laws were potentially used more seriously. Another study published recently suggests that permit-to-purchase (PTP) laws see a meaningful “14% reduction in firearm homicide in large, urban counties, whereas the right to carry laws had the opposite effect on firearm homicide rates. The author of the latter study says that there is still more granular work to be done in the “right-to-carry” states.
One aspect of state gun laws that still needs study, she says, is the effect of differing requirements to obtain a concealed carry permit. Some states, such as Texas, demand training and testing, while others, such as Washington state, don't.
"Gun policy people have tended to lump these right-to-carry states together," she says. "But training standards are very, very different across states. So our next steps in our research is to parse out if there are elements of concealed carry laws that are effective or maybe protective against firearm violence, compared to others."
So, we can continue to advocate a policy of “thinking and praying,” which has yielded zero positive results, or we can try some new laws and just see if more positive outcomes can be achieved.