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Which Gun Laws Work?

On May 14, 10 people were shot and killed in a racist attack in Buffalo, New York. Ten days later, a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. And on Wednesday, an assailant carried out yet another deadly mass shooting at a medical building in Tulsa, Oklahoma. These events have reignited the deeply polarized debate about guns in America.

Data could help settle these disagreements, says RAND's Andrew Morral.

Morral leads the Gun Policy in America initiative, which seeks to establish a shared set of facts to inform the development of fair and effective gun policies. Since 2016, he and his colleagues have reviewed thousands of scientific articles to identify credible evidence about the effects of different gun laws.

The researchers found strong evidence to suggest that several policies—child-access prevention laws, for example—are effective at reducing injuries and death. But more often than not, strong evidence about the effects of gun laws is not available. This reflects an underfunding of gun policy research that has persisted in the United States for decades.

“We should not expect to implement laws only for which we have strong scientific evidence,” says Morral. Policymakers and the public may instead need to rely on logical considerations and weaker evidence. For example, there is mounting evidence that background checks decrease homicides. There is also moderately strong evidence that waiting period laws decrease firearm suicides and homicides, and that laws prohibiting firearms possession by people with domestic-violence restraining orders decrease intimate-partner homicides.

Some people who argue about guns are never going to be swayed by scientific evidence regarding firearms policies, Morral notes. But many of the arguments involve empirical questions that can be answered with good research.