(Mint Press) – According to a recent study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), states that have the strictest gun laws experienced a lower mortality rate from firearms than states that have fewer laws.
The study, undertaken by researchers from Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health, asserts that the states with the most gun laws experience a 40 percent reduction in firearm-related homicides and a 37 percent reduction in firearm-related suicides.
“States that have the most laws have a 42 percent decreased rate of firearm fatalities compared to those with the least laws,” said Dr. Eric W. Fleegler, an attending physician in pediatric emergency medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.
The study used data reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2007 through 2010. These figures were compared with state-level legislation aggregated by the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence that are in excess of minimum requirements called for by the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act.
What the study revealed
These state laws were judged on whether the law met certain public safety criteria, such as child safety, banning military-style assault weapons, strengthening Brady background checks or restricting guns in public places. Based on how many different areas a state’s laws covered, a “legislative strength score” was assigned to help place in context the state’s mortality rate. The “legislative strength score” ranged from 0 for Utah to 24 for Massachusetts.
Massachusetts, who has the most restrictive gun laws in the nation — per this study — has 1.7 gun-related suicides and 1.7 gun-related homicides per 100,000 individuals. California, with the second-highest “legislative strength score” with 22, has a suicide and homicide rate of 4.0 per 100,000 individuals, and New Jersey — also with a score of 22 — has a suicide rate of 1.9 per 100,000 individuals and a homicide rate of 3.0.
In contrast, Utah — which has almost no gun laws in excess of the Brady Act — has a suicide rate of 8.8 per 100,00 and a homicide rate of 1.1. Alaska — with a score of one for legislative strength — has a suicide rate of 14.4 and a homicide rate of 3.2. Montana, with a legislation score of 2.5, bears a 12.8 rate for suicides and a 1.8 for homicides.
The absolute difference — or, the difference from the best performing state and the worst in regards to legislative strength — for suicide rates was 6.25 deaths per 100,000, and was 0.40 deaths per 100,000 in the homicide rates.
“When you’re talking about 300 million people, you’re talking about thousands of deaths that would not otherwise have occurred,” said Dr. Eric Fleegler, the lead author for the study. “We anticipated that there was going to be a relationship between state laws and firearm mortality. The magnitude of the effect, a 42 percent reduction, that was a big number to look at.”
The authors do admit, however, that this correlation does not reflect a true relationship between gun laws and mortality, but simply a casual association that may or may not reflect the reality of gun laws on death rates.
Fleegler said his study “speaks to the importance of having legislation. One of the things that we’ve learned over time is that there are laws that have been passed that have large loopholes, and those loopholes make the enforcement and efficacy of the laws diminished. There are ways to make these laws better and stronger.”
Objections to the study
Dr. Garen Wintemute, an emergency medicine physician and director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, argues that the reader of this study should be careful in interpreting the results of this study. He says that the study takes no account of the specifics of the laws — paying attention only to the presence of the laws — and does not look into how much effort the states put into enforcing the laws.
Most importantly, the study does not look at gun ownership per state. When this is taken into consideration, Massachusetts’s small death rate is what would be expected for a state with a low gun ownership rate.
“This is a problem because there are two completely opposite explanations for why that might be the case,” Wintemute said in a video issued by his university. “One is that these laws work, and that they work by decreasing the rate of gun ownership in a state, because we know that the rate of gun ownership is associated with the rate of violent death in a state.”
“But the other possibility, that’s at least as plausible, is that it’s easier to enact these laws in states that have a low rate of gun ownership to begin with. Gun ownership is not as important in those states, there’s less opposition,” he added. “We really don’t know what to do with the results. We cannot say that these laws — individually or in aggregate — drive firearm death rates up or down.”
However, there have been 16 National Institutes of Health-backed studies that definitively correlates an increase in likelihood to death by suicide to access to firearms. This reflects the argument that in states where it is harder to obtain a firearm, suicide rates are lower.
Wintermute acknowledged that the researchers did a good job with what they had to work with, as — in the 1990s — the National Rifle Association (NRA) successfully lobbied to have language inserted into the CDC’s appropriation that limited how it can study and address firearm injuries. “We agree that there is a lot more research that needs to be done, that funding to allow robust research and robust collection of data is what’s really going to move the science forward for understanding how we can reduce deaths,” he said.
However, as Wintermute points out, until the right question is posed and the right methodology is drawn out, then useful conclusions cannot be drawn.