Study Finds 3 Laws Could Reduce Firearm Deaths By 90% (meta.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The study, published in The Lancet, used a cross-sectional, state-level dataset relating to a host of topics associated with firearm mortality including gun ownership and even unemployment from across the U.S. to examine the relationship between recorded gun deaths and gun-control legislation. The study found that some laws, such as those that restrict gun access to children through locks and age restrictions, were simply ineffective while others, such as the stand-your-ground law that allows individuals to use deadly force in self-defense, actually increase gun-related deaths significantly. According to the study's model, a federal law expanding background checks for all gun purchases could reduce the national gun death rate by 57%, lowering it from 10.35 to 4.46 per 100,000 people while background checks for all ammunition purchases could lower the rate by 81% to 1.99 per 100,000 and firearm identification could reduce it by 83% to 1.81 per 100,000. If the federal government implemented all three laws, the scholars predict that the overall national rate of firearm deaths would drop by over 90% to 0.16 per 100,000.

Comments

Yeah, um, not so much

[Anonymous Coward]

'Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Gun Policy and Research, told the Washington Post, “Briefly, this is not a credible study and no cause and effect inferences should be made from it.” Webster is later quoted, stating, “What I find both puzzling and troubling is this very flawed piece of research is published in one of the most prestigious scientific journals around Something went awry here, and it harms public trust.”'

Re:Yeah, um, not so much

[Anonymous Coward]

Gosh, I'd love to find the link and read the whole context of your Daniel Webster quote. I tried to googled it, and my meager search skills were unable to locate the source

I was interested too and I found it with DuckDuckGo. You can read the quote on an NRA website and in the Washington Post.

Re:Yeah, um, not so much

[Nonesuch]

Gosh, I'd love to find the link and read the whole context of your Daniel Webster quote. I tried to googled it, and my meager search skills were unable to locate the source.

And, given the stuff Webster has written elsewhere about the public health approach, see http://annals.org/article.aspx... this quote doesn't really sound like Webster...

As you've noted, Mr. Webster runs the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Gun Policy and Research; his job is basically to fund and promote anti-gun research, so when Daniel Webster comes out and says a pro-gun-control study is flawed you know it has got to have some serious problems! Looks like the majority of the Daniel Webster quotes indicting Bindu Kalesan's study are from an email exchange with the Washington Post.

And STILL even that wouldn't prevent the deaths

[raymorris]

As a very clear example why this (and most) anti-gun "studies" are silly, one large category is suicides. They measured suicides that used guns before a ban/law to how many suicides used guns afterwards. They found that people who kill themselves are less likely to use a gun if guns are less available. What they didn't find was a drastic change in the number of suicides. Still the same number of people dead. They pretend that if someone dies jumping off a bridge, that's fine, suicide is only bad if they use a gun.

This same fundamental error (trick?) is used in most anti-gun studies, they say "gun deaths" and "gun crime". Comparing murder, rape, robbery, and total violent crime for the ten years before the UK gun ban vs the ten years after, we find that murder, rape, robbery, and total violent crime all doubled immediately after the ban. The kooks publish studies saying it's great that there were fewer "gun murders". According to their reasoning, it's better to have two people stabbed to death than one person shot.