DO TOUGHER GUN LAWS SLOW FIREARM DEATHS?
Analysis suggests they help despite varied homicide rates among states with strict regulations
When mass shootings erupted earlier this year in Georgia, Colorado and Indiana, there was a sad sense about it to many Californians. Look at their gun laws. No waiting period to buy firearms. No assault weapons ban.
But the Bay Area just saw its deadliest mass shooting late last month, the second this year in California, a state with the nation’s
strictest laws on gun ownership. The San Jose light rail yard massacre reignited the country’s gun violence debate, with cries for new federal laws countered by observations that California’s many restrictions didn’t stop the latest killings.
So who’s right? A Bay Area News Group analysis of recent gun death data from 2015-2019 shows there’s a strong correlation between strict state gun laws and lower overall firearm fatality rates. But nearly two-thirds of
those deaths were suicides, and only about a third were homicides.
Looking just at homicides, there’s a wide range of gun death rates among states with weak as well as strict gun laws. A similar picture emerges when looking just at mass shootings in recent years.
To gun-rights advocates, it affirms their argument that gun laws aren’t effective and even counterproductive.
“Gun control doesn’t save lives and doesn’t stop firearm-related crimes,” said Aidan Johnston, director of federal affairs for Gun Owners of America, based in Virginia. “Gun control disarms lawabiding citizens who might otherwise equip themselves with the tools to fight back against criminals and mass murderers.”
To those seeking stricter and more uniform gun legislation nationally, the figures affirm that stricter gun laws work, even if some states that have them still
see higher homicide and mass shooting rates.
“We know we have more work to do, but among the 50 states, California has the seventh-lowest rate of gun deaths in the U.S., so I think there’s a lot of evidence that California gun laws are working and saving lives,” said Kelly Drane, research director for the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, based in San Francisco.
The debate comes as a federal judge in San Diego on Friday ruled that the Golden State’s 32-year-old ban on assault-style weapons violated Californians’ constitutional right to bear arms. Attorney General Rob Bonta immediately vowed to appeal the decision, setting up another fierce legal battle over California’s strict gun laws.
But what do the figures tell us? Nationwide, firearm mortality data compiled by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show a total of 194,130 firearm fatalities from 2015 through 2019, the most recent year available. Of those, 117,183, or more than 60%, were suicides. Homicides totaled 70,308, or 36%. The rest included 2,606 killings by law enforcement, 2,414 unintentional deaths and 1,619 that could not be determined.
A number of studies have linked firearm access to higher suicide rates. A Stanford University study a year ago found gun ownership increased suicide risk eight times in men and 35 times in women.
Taken together, the annual firearm fatality rate per 100,000 residents over the five-year period by state shows a strong correlation to gun restrictions. The states with the 10 highest firearm fatality rates, from 23.5 in Alaska to 18.1 in Oklahoma, also have the least restrictions on firearm ownership.
Alaska and Oklahoma have no waiting period on gun purchases, no universal background checks on all firearm sales, no restrictions on military-style assault weapons or largecapacity ammunition magazines or red-flag laws to temporarily disarm menacing or deranged people.
Giffords, the gun control advocacy group, grades states annually on the strength of their gun laws. It gave all but one state with the 10 highest firearm fatality rates an F. That state, New Mexico — which received a C+ gun law grade and had a firearm fatality rate of 19.9 — has universal background checks and a red-flag law.
The states with the 10 lowest firearm fatality rates ranged from Massachusetts (3.6), whose gun laws Giffords rated A-minus, to Nebraska (9.3), graded a C. California — graded A for its strict gun laws — had the country’s seventh-lowest firearm fatality rate at 3.5 per 100,000 residents.
Looking at homicides, the states with the 10 highest rates — from Louisiana (10.9) to Georgia (6.2) — typically had few gun laws and an F grade from Giffords. But there were two rated A- among them: Maryland (7.4) and Illinois (6.5).
But that didn’t tell the full story. Half the states with the 10 lowest homicide rates also had loose gun laws and F grades from Giffords, from Maine (0.8) to South Dakota (1.5), both Frated. Only two of the states with the 10 lowest rates had high gun law ratings, Hawaii (0.9) and Massachusetts (1.4), both graded Aminus.
Does that all add up to suggest gun laws are not effective at preventing homicide?
Drane at Giffords said research suggests otherwise, such as a study on waiting periods for gun purchases that found a 17% reduction in homicides and 11% reduction in suicides. The bigger difference, she said, is large cities.
“Gun homicides tend to cluster in large cities,” Drane said, where overall crime rates tend to be higher. “Maine doesn’t have large cities that a state like California or Maryland would have.”
She also notes that many states including Florida, Nevada and New Mexico strengthened their gun laws after horrific mass shootings in recent years and said it can take years for the effects of those laws to become evident in their gun death rates.
But gun-rights advocates have their own arguments. Johnston says focusing solely on firearm fatalities and homicides ignores the other side of the equation — people who use a gun to defend themselves — something that’s not nearly as well documented.
He points to a 2013 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine study on reducing gun violence cited by the CDC that said “almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals.”
But it noted an enormous range of estimates for how many times a year people use guns to defend themselves — from as few as 60,000 to more than 3 million — which it compared to 300,000 annual violent crimes involving firearms based on 2008 figures. It said the number of defensive gun uses and whether they outweigh potential risks of guns to their owners need further study.
Whether gun laws reduce mass shooting deaths is harder to say because such shootings aren’t uniformly defined and are too infrequent to draw clear statistical conclusions. The publication Mother Jones has been tracking mass shootings of three or more victims killed in public places since 2013. Its list since 2015 shows a total of 53 nationwide that killed 435 people.
In the Mother Jones data for those years, Nevada had the highest rate of mass shooting deaths per year, 18.7 per million residents — all from a single incident, the October 2017 massacre at a Las Vegas country music festival that remains the nation’s worst mass shooting. The gunman killed 58 people that day as well as himself. Nevada’s recently improved gun laws now rate a C+ from Giffords.
But California, with one of the nation’s toughest gun laws, had the most mass shooting incidents — 10 — and the ninth-highest rate of people killed (1.5 per 100,000). The second-highest rate (3.9) was Florida, whose gun laws Giffords now grades C-. Among the six mass shootings in that state since 2015 was the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting that killed 49.
Drane said such analyses can vary greatly depending on the period studied, pointing to a 2019 study in the BMJ health journal that found states with more permissive gun laws had an 11.5% higher rate of mass shootings from 1998 to 2015.
Greg Woods, a San Jose State University justice studies professor, noted that “firearms continue to be the most common weapon used in homicides.” But after reviewing the data, he said that “although California’s gun violence rates appear to be lower than the national average, it’s difficult to conclude how much of that is due to onerous firearm regulations.”
“Time and again, incidents and statistics remind us that criminally motivated individuals are less likely to follow such laws,” Woods said. “In spite of good faith efforts by legislatures throughout our nation, we continue to witness record gun sales and increased gun violence due to multiple factors, including mental health, substance abuse, domestic tension and socioeconomic conditions.”