Part of the problem is these laws are so new there isn’t much data available. And as the CEO of the American Psychological Association's President said in response to Trump’s statement, "Blaming mental illness for the gun violence in our country is simplistic and inaccurate and goes against the scientific evidence currently available." While advocating for a decrease in suicide rates through gun laws is absolutely critical, our findings suggest that focusing on the implementation of more fundamental gun control laws will lead not only to a reduction in suicides but also in homicides. Peer-reviewed studies have found that these laws are associated with lower suicide rates. These results suggest that these more traditional gun control laws work. Mental health reporting laws, on the other hand, did not. Again, many gun control laws-such as buyer background check and safe storage laws-significantly predicted lower suicide and homicide rates.
We also ran linear regression models to predict fatal injury rates from the strength of each state's gun policies, after controlling for differences across states and years. Decreases in fatal injuries were most strongly correlated with gun-access and gun-use restrictions, such as owner licensing requirements, gun dealer regulations, and local regulations that allow municipalities to pass their own firearms ordinances as an addition to state gun laws. Consistent with past research, we found that although mental health reporting laws are weakly associated with lower suicide rates, they showed no correlation with homicide rates. First we calculated the simple pairwise correlations between the strength of a policy in a given year and corresponding fatal injury outcomes from the following year. To measure the strengths of each law, we used data on state gun policies provided by the Giffords Law Center and fatal injury statistics from the Centers for Disease Control’s web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System.įor each gun policy, we ran two separate tests. More recent polls have revealed that similarly uninformed sentiments remain.įrustrated by the sparse studies on the subject, we dug into the data from 22 unique gun law policies from the last decade to see which show the strongest correlation with gun injuries and deaths. Fewer respondents blamed other factors like gun access, despite the fact that limiting access has a well-established, strong correlation with reduced gun accidents and deaths. Ling Liang Dong is a recent Yale University graduate and currently conducts research at Microsoft Research NYC.Ī 2013 Gallup poll found that almost half of respondents viewed mental illness as “a great deal to blame” for mass shootings, although there is no data to support a causal link between mental illness and gun violence. Joseph Pomianowski is a Yale Law School graduate and conducts research at the Polish Academy of Sciences.
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