What do we really know about the research on whether gun restrictions help reduce gun deaths? Even for PhDs, this is a difficult question. There's been a mountain of research on the subject, but these dozens of studies conducted over many years and in many different countries reach a broad and sometimes contradictory range of conclusions. It's hard to know what it really tells us, taken together, about whether gun laws can reduce gun violence.
A just-released study, published in the February issue of Epidemiological Reviews, seeks to resolve this problem. It systematically reviewed the evidence from around the world on gun laws and gun violence, looking to see if the best studies come to similar conclusions. It is the first such study to look at the international research in this way.
The authors are careful to note that their findings do not conclusively prove that gun restrictions reduce gun deaths. However, they did find a compelling trend whereby new restrictions on gun purchasing and ownership tended to be followed by a decline in gun deaths.
"Across countries, instead of seeing an increase in the homicide rate, we saw a reduction," Julian Santaella-Tenorio, a doctoral student in epidemiology at Columbia University and the study's lead author, told me.
What the study found
Santaella-Tenorio's study (co-authored with Columbia professors Magdalena Cerdá and Sandro Galea, as well as the University of North Carolina's Andrés Villaveces) examined roughly 130 studies that had been conducted in 10 different countries. Each of those 130 studies had looked at some specific change in gun laws and its effect on homicide and/or suicide rates. Most of those 130 studies looked at law changes in the developed world, such as the US, Australia, and Austria. A few looked at gun laws in developing countries, specifically Brazil and South Africa.
This isn't, then, a study that compiled its own original data on one specific gun law. It's actually more valuable than that: It's telling us what all the different studies on individual laws say when you examine them put together.
So what do Santaella-Tenorio et al. conclude? First, and most importantly, that gun violence declined after countries pass a raft of gun laws at the same time: "The simultaneous implementation of laws targeting multiple firearms restrictions is associated with reductions in firearm deaths," the study finds.
This finding doesn't highlight one specific law, like an assault weapon ban, in isolation. There were "so many different kinds of laws," Santaella-Tenorio explains, that it was hard to make good international comparisons on every specific kind of gun restriction.
Rather, countries passed big packages of gun laws, which overhauled the nation's firearm code fairly broadly, which all tended to share similar features. According to Santaella-Tenorio, they generally included:
- Banning "weapons that are actually very powerful," like automatic weapons.
- "They all implemented background checks."
- "They all required permits and licenses for purchasing guns."
South Africa's comprehensive Firearm Control Act, passed in 2000, contained all these measures. One study found that firearm homicides in five major South African cities decreased by 13.6 percent per year for the next five years. "Reductions in nonfirearm homicides were also observed," Santaella-Tenorio et al. note, "although not as pronounced as the ones observed for firearm homicides."
Read more
http://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11120184/gun-control-study-international-evidence
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