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TUESDAY, June 16, 2020 (HealthDay News) — Implementation of more restrictive gun policies may result in a small decrease in firearm-related deaths, according to a study published online June 15 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Terry L. Schell, Ph.D., from the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, and colleagues examined the effects of three classes of gun laws on total firearm-related deaths: child access prevention (CAP), right to carry (RTC), and stand your ground (SYG) laws. Using Bayesian methods and a modeling approach to address methodological limitations of prior evaluations, the analyses exploited changes in these policies from 1970 to 2016.<\/p>\n
The researchers found that CAP laws had the strongest evidence of an association with the firearm-related death rate, with a probability of 0.97 that the death rate decreased at six years after implementation. For RTC and SYG laws, the probability of being associated with an increase in firearm-related deaths was 0.87 and 0.77, respectively. The restrictive gun policy regime (having a CAP law without an RTC or SYG law) had a 0.98 probability of being associated with a decrease in firearm-related deaths relative to the permissive policy regime, corresponding to a decrease of 11 percent in firearm-related deaths.<\/p>\n
“While there is still uncertainty in our estimates, these findings suggest that moving from the most-permissive to most-restrictive policy regime concerning how individuals store or use firearms is likely to reduce the number of firearm deaths,” Schell said in a statement.<\/p>\n