by Sierra Smucker, Max Griswold, Amanda Charbonneau, Rose Kerber, Terry L. Schell, Andrew R. Morral

Among researchers, policymakers, and advocates, momentum is growing to better understand the impact of firearm laws on a variety of outcomes (e.g., suicide, crime, defensive gun use, homicide). There is also a growing interest in data that can shed light on these relationships. One source of these data is the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). This system includes information used in background checks, the number and type of background checks processed, and details on the number of and reason for denials when NICS finds that an individual is prohibited from purchasing a firearm. In this tool, researchers provide detailed information about data associated with NICS and discuss the data's strengths and weaknesses for various gun policy evaluation objectives. The researchers also outline the substantial limitations to interpreting these data to assist researchers in this field. Finally, they provide these data to researchers to encourage further exploration and evaluation of how NICS data might be used for policy analysis.

Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2022. 65p.

By Christoph Koenig and David Schindler 

  Do firearm purchase delay laws reduce aggregate homicide levels? Using variation from a 6-month countrywide gun demand shock in 2012/2013, we show that U.S. states with legislation preventing immediate handgun purchases experienced smaller increases in handgun sales. Our findings indicate that this is likely driven by comparatively lower purchases among impulsive consumers. We then demonstrate that states with purchase delays also witnessed comparatively 2% lower homicide rates during the same period. Further evidence shows that lower handgun sales coincided primarily with fewer impulsive assaults and points towards reduced acts of domestic violence.   

Discussion Paper 20 / 730  

Bristol, UK: Bristol University, School of Economics, 2020. 70p.

By Jonathan Colmer, Jennifer Doleac:

Gun violence is a major problem in the United States, and extensive prior work has shown that higher temperatures increase violent behavior. In this paper, we consider whether restricting the concealed carry of firearms mitigates or exacerbates the effect of temperature on violence. We use two identification strategies that exploit daily variation in temperature and variation in gun control policies between and within states. Our findings suggest that more prohibitive concealed carry laws attenuate the temperature–homicide relationship. Additional results suggest that restrictions primarily decrease the lethality of temperature–driven violent crimes, rather than their overall occurrence, but may be less effective at reducing access to guns in more urban areas.

 Bonn: IZA – Institute of Labor Economics, 2023. 67p,  

Benjamin L. Cavataro

This article argues that the status quo is unacceptable, and proposes a clear, workable solution. Congress should empower the Commission to regulate the safety of guns as products, without granting the Commission authority over "gun control" as traditionally understood. This approach resolves the inadequacies of industry self-regulation, tort, and state consumer law; appropriately leverages the existing Consumer Product Safety Act framework; and is consistent with the Commission’s longstanding oversight of holsters, gun locks, and gun safes. Under this approach, the firearms industry would be obligated to report safety defects, recall dangerously defective firearms, and offer remedies to consumers. The Commission could also consider adopting common-sense product safety standards (such as regulations to ensure that new firearms have functional safety devices, and do not discharge without a trigger pull), just as the Commission adopts safety standards for many other consumer products. But the Commission would be precluded from regulating guns to curtail gun violence or suicide, or to reduce guns’ prevalence.

This approach is fully compatible with the Second Amendment in light of New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022). And lifting the firearms industry’s immunity from product safety law—thereby regulating guns as products—has helpful implications for broader debates on gun law and policy. By establishing that Commission regulation could simultaneously protect the public from harm and facilitate the right to lawful self-defense, this Article’s proposal demonstrates that some gun regulations can concurrently respect gun rights, uphold consumers’ rights, and protect lives—and, in doing so, reveals fissures between the interests of the gun industry and gun owners.

 Forthcoming in George Washington Law Review, Vol. 92 (2024),

By  Eric Ruben

Gun rights supporters appear to be on the cusp of achieving a decades-long goal: defanging licensing laws nationwide for carrying handguns in public. More than twenty states have removed all licensing requirements for concealed carry, and most of the others now require little more than a background check.  At oral argument in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, meanwhile, the Supreme Court seemed poised to strike down policies in the remaining states that limit licenses to those who can show a heightened need, or “proper cause,” to carry a gun. If that happens, what comes next?

More people carrying guns in public can have negative consequences. Among other things, additional gun carriers might engage in more serious crimes than they otherwise would and might threaten the public sphere in ways beyond deaths and injuries. Under those circumstances, regulation will remain a priority in much of the country. With strong licensing regimes off the table, a key focal point will be how criminal law otherwise governs gun carry and use.

This Essay highlights two intersections between criminal law and public carry beyond licensing: the “he was going for my gun” defense invoked in several recent, high-profile trials and the deadly weapon doctrine. These intersections show how criminal law can both grant legal benefits to and erect legal hurdles for those who chose to carry a gun in public. On one hand, the “he was going for my gun” defense advantages armed defendants with greater legal leeway to use deadly defensive force, lest they be disarmed. On the other hand, the deadly weapon doctrine disadvantages such defendants by allowing juries to infer requisite mens rea for murder from the use of a gun in a homicide. If the ability to restrict public carry directly through meaningful licensing regimes becomes politically or constitutionally infeasible, judges, policymakers, and scholars will need to consider the propriety and efficacy of criminal law mechanisms like these to achieve optimal outcomes in a world where many more people will be armed.

Harvard Law Review, VOLUME 135. ISSUE 8. JUNE 2022

By  Katharina Krüsselmann, Pauline Aarten, Marieke Liem, Sven Granath, Janne Kivivuori, Nora Markwalder, Karoliina Suonpää, Asser Hedegaard Thomsen, Simone Walser

Detailed, comparative research on firearm violence in Europe is rare. Using data from the European Homicide Monitor, this paper presents the prevalence and characteristics of firearm homicides in Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland between 2001 and 2016. Furthermore, we compare firearm to non-firearm homicides to assess the degree of uniqueness of firearms as modus operandi. We find that the firearm homicide rate varies across our sample of countries. We also identify two country profiles: in Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden, most firearm homicides take place in public and urban areas, involving male victims and perpetrators. In these countries, the use of firearms in homicides is largely concentrated in the criminal milieu. In Finland and Switzerland, firearms are mostly used in domestic homicides, with a higher share of female victims. We explore these findings in relation to firearm availability in each country.

GLOBAL CRIME                                               2023, VOL. 24, NO. 2, 145–167

By Sarah Watson

Mass shootings are one example of a focusing event that has particular significance for firearms legislation. Mass shootings shock, disturb and provoke enormous and controversial debate, often causing significant public and media resonance, becoming the subject of intense discussion politically. At times providing an impetus for legislative amendments, often in distinct ways that routine gun violence does not. If certain events highlight the need for reform, policy change becomes more likely. Cases with the lowest number of victims are likely to generate the least amount of attention and are most likely to be missed in data collection, rendering them the least noteworthy, least important in terms of lethality and social and political consequence. Various problems come to the attention of people in and around government, necessitating an understanding of why such problems occupy officials’ attention and appear to be more ‘deserving’ of attention.

Criminology & Criminal JusticeOnlineFirst, July 19, 2022

By Everytown Research

The gun industry has long attempted to avoid taking responsibility for the use of its products in crime. The industry has even successfully fought for protections like federal immunity from most lawsuits and a rule that makes it difficult for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to share information about the guns that are used in crimes. To combat this head-in-the-sand approach to gun violence, Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund embarked on a city-by-city collection of data on recovered crime guns, specifically seeking to answer the question of which gun manufacturers’ weapons are showing up at America’s crime scenes. The data collection was made possible by Everytown’s long-standing coalition of mayors fighting to end gun violence — Mayors Against Illegal Guns. The data received included 171,501 crime guns recovered across 31 U.S. cities, including recoveries from 2017 to 2021. Guns recovered in connection to crimes — referred to as “crime guns” — are important to our understanding of gun violence, trafficking and public safety solutions.

Our analysis finds that Glock has the dubious distinction of being the gun manufacturer with the most crime guns. On average, over 1.5 times more Glocks were recovered at crime scenes than the second-leading manufacturer across the collected data. In 2021, four gun manufacturers accounted for over half of the recovered crime guns in the dataset: Glock, Smith & Wesson, Taurus, and Ruger.

New York: Everytown Research, 2023. 13p.

By Everytown for Gun Safety

In an average year, gun violence in America kills 40,000 people, wounds twice as many, and has an economic consequence to our nation of $557 billion. Without a doubt, the human cost of gun violence—the people who are taken from us and the survivors whose lives are forever altered—is the most devastating. In addition to this human impact, examining the serious economic consequences of gun violence offers a wider lens for understanding just how extensive and expensive this crisis is. …This $557 billion problem represents the lifetime costs associated with gun violence, including three types of costs: immediate costs starting at the scene of a shooting, such as police investigations and medical treatment; subsequent costs, such as treatment, long-term physical and mental health care, earnings lost to disability or death, and criminal justice costs; and cost estimates of quality of life lost over a victim’s life span for pain and suffering of victims and their families. As survivors, families, communities, employers, and taxpayers, we all pay for the enormous costs associated with this violence, whether we own a gun or not. The daily toll is staggering….The large variation in rates of gun deaths and injuries in the 50 states and Washington, DC, translates into substantial differences in the economic burden from this violence. 

New York: Everytown Research, 2022. 9p.

By Robert VerBruggen

  The past 40 years have seen nothing short of a revolution in Americans’ right to carry a concealed firearm in public. In 1980, the vast majority of states either did not grant concealed weapon permits or offered them only on a “may-issue” basis, meaning that authorities retained discretion to deny applications. Since then, many states have adopted “shall-issue” laws, under which anyone who meets certain objective requirements—such as passing a background check, paying a fee, and getting some training—is guaranteed a permit. In recent years, more than 20 states have decided not even to require permits, though restrictions based on age, criminal history, etc., still apply. And earlier this year, in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution protects the right to public carry while striking down New York’s requirement that permit applicants demonstrate a special need to carry, but allowing states to continue to require objective criteria. Now that right-to-carry (RTC) is becoming universal, the purpose of this brief is to ask what the policy’s consequences for crime rates have been thus far. In many ways, it is the perfect “natural experiment.” One by one, most of the states throughout the country decided to make it much easier to carry guns in public; if either side of the gun debate is correct, these policy changes should have led to sizable shifts in crime rates. In theory, measuring such shifts should be easy because during times when some states were changing their laws, others were not— and the latter may serve as a handy control group for the former. With so many experiments running for so many years, the results should be clear by now, both in the raw data and with the aid of modern statistics. That is not how things have played out. Twenty-five years after the first rigorous studies on RTC were published, social science has not resolved the issue…

New York: The Manhattan Institute, 2022. 22p.

By Sounak Chakraborty ,Charles E. Menifield, Ranadeep Daw

Stand Your Ground lethal force laws deepen disparities in the legal system and disproportionately justify the use of violence by people who are white and male against people who are not. In July 2018 at a convenience store near Clearwater, Florida, a 28-year-old man named Markeis McGlockton was shot and killed in front of his longtime girlfriend and their three young children following a minor confrontation with another customer in the parking lot. Security camera footage of the killing showed that McGlockton was at least 10 feet away from the gunman, Michael Drejka, and beginning to turn away when the lethal shot was fired. McGlockton, a Black man, was unarmed. Drejka, who is white, was initially not even arrested, despite the security camera footage, multiple credible eyewitnesses and Drejka’s own known history of threatening violence with a firearm. The reason? The county sheriff announced at a press conference the day after the incident that he believed Drejka shooting McGlockton was “within the bookends of ‘stand your ground’ and within the bookends of force being justified” under Florida law. Being shoved in a parking lot – in an altercation instigated by Drejka – was deemed sufficient grounds for lethal force. (Two weeks later, the sheriff’s office turned the case over to the state attorney’s office, and Drejka was ultimately convicted of manslaughter. This chain of events is common; law enforcement and prosecutors have at least initially cited Stand Your Ground laws in determining not to arrest the killers of Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, and more recently, Ahmaud Arbery, to name only a few.) ……. 27 states have enacted Stand Your Ground laws, and eight more have had de facto Stand Your Ground standards established by court decisions. We urge state lawmakers to repeal these laws and overturn these court decisions. We wrote this report to help provide advocates and lawmakers with the facts they need to make it happen.

Giffords Law Center. 2022. 27p.

By Brendan Cooley and  Noam Reich  

  Street gangs are conjectured to engage in violent territorial competition. This competition can be difficult to study empirically as the number of gangs and the division of territory between them are unobserved to the analyst. However, traces of gang conflict manifest themselves in police and administrative data on violent crime. In this paper, we show that the frequency and locations of shootings are sufficient statistics for the number of gangs in operation in a city and the territorial partition between them under mild assumptions about the data generating processes for gang-related and non-gang related shootings. We then show how to estimate this territorial partition from a panel of geolocated shooting data. We apply our method to analyze the structure of gang territorial competition in Chicago using victim-based crime reports from the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and validate our methodology on gang territorial maps produced by the CPD. We detect the present of 3-4 gangs whose estimated territorial footprint we match to CPD maps. After matching, 56-60 percent of our partition labels agree with those of the CPD. This performance compares favorably to an agreement rate of 35 percent when CPD labels are randomly permuted.

Unpublished paper: 2022. 35p.

By Everytown Research and Policy 

Analysis from 750 cities of data available for the first times reveals that:

• The rate of people who died by gun suicide in cities increased 11 percent over the past decade, and now make up an average of over four in 10 city gun deaths.

• Cities in states with the strongest gun violence prevention laws have about half the rate of people who die by gun suicide as those in states with the weakest laws, demonstrating the importance of legislative action in preventing gun violence in cities.

• Cities with the most gun shops experience nearly four times higher rates of people who die by gun suicide than those with the fewest gun shops, signaling the importance of expanding cities’ focus beyond illegal guns.

• Smaller cities and those with fewer walkable neighborhoods (i.e., distance to local resources) experience higher rates of people who die by gun suicide, underscoring the importance of adequate access to resources and networks of social support that reduce risk factors like social isolation.

• Cities with the most parks have about half the rate of people who die by gun suicide as those with the least, suggesting that cleaning and greening efforts may offer benefits in reducing both gun homicides and suicides.

New York: Everytown Research, 2022.

By Everytown for Gun Safety

Every January, thousands of firearm, ammunition, and accessory manufacturers and importers gather in Las Vegas to show off their new products at the largest trade show of its kind. The Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show is the gun industry’s biggest event of the year, garnering some 55,000 attendees in 2020, before the pandemic, and currently boasting more than 2,400 exhibitors.1 But unlike other gun shows, the SHOT Show is a closed-door event open only to exhibitors, potential customers who buy in bulk — including gun wholesalers, retailers, and military and law enforcement personnel — and media outlets that regularly cover firearms.

The first event associated with the annual SHOT Show falls on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, when attendees are shuttled 30 miles into the desert to shoot hundreds of new guns from various manufacturers at a massive outdoor shooting range in Boulder City, Nevada.2 The official convention then takes place indoors, at the Venetian Expo Center and Caesars Forum in Las Vegas, where attendees can walk “13.9 miles of aisles”3 over four days to inspect all the new guns, ammo, and related gear on display — after getting through security....

New York: Everytown for Gun Safety, 2023. 

By The Police Executive Research Forum (PERF)

  On Wednesday, February 14, 2018, shortly after 2 p.m., the deadliest mass shooting at a high school in U.S. history began, at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. In a period of approximately six minutes, 17 students and school staff members were killed, and another 17 were injured. Understandably, the Parkland shooting dominated the news for months, pushing other news about gun violence off the front pages. But mass shootings are only one aspect of the gun violence problem in America. To get a sense of the broader picture, let’s look at a few of the other gun violence incidents that occurred in the days before the Parkland shooting: • Suicide of 23-year-old woman: One day before the Parkland school shooting, on February 13, 23-year-old Samantha Harer of Channahon, Illinois died from a single gunshot wound to her head. The death was investigated and ruled a suicide. • Barricaded gunman in Detroit killed after shooting six people: On Monday, February 12, a barricaded gunman in Detroit fatally shot three women and injured three police officers with gunfire before fatally shooting himself. Executive Summary: Gun Violence Is 4 Different Problems, with Different Causes and Solutions • Ohio officers killed responding to domestic violence call: On Saturday, February 10, two police officers from Westerville, Ohio were fatally shot after responding to a domestic violence call. The incidents cited above are a random sample of gun violence incidents. The only thing they have in common is that they occurred within a few days of each other. But they illustrate a main point of this report: that “the gun violence problem” in the United States is actually several different problems, with different causes, different perpetrators, different victims, and different solutions.  

Washington DC: PERF, 2019. 72p.  

By Peter Squires, et al. 

  Even before the handgun ban introduced in 1998 following the school shooting at Dunblane, Scotland, the UK had one of the world’s stricter firearms control regimes. Partly as a consequence, rates of firearm ownership in England, Wales and Scotland were low, even by European standards. More recently, however, with increasing concerns about gang involved violence, mass shootings, organised crime and terrorism; questions of firearms control have taken on a new significance. In Europe generally, firearm ownership has been creeping upwards and, even as police and security agencies have developed new methods to disrupt firearm trafficking, criminal entrepreneurs find new ways to transport illegal firearms. The trafficking of weapons has been addressed at the European level but issues arising from distinct and separate national ‘gun cultures’ and legal systems, wavering political will, varying ballistic analysis capabilities and differing levels of enthusiasm for intelligence sharing have meant that firearms control across Europe resembles a patchwork with numerous loopholes. Although the introduction of NABIS (the National Ballistics Intelligence Service) in Britain represents an important step forward in ballistics analysis, weapons tracing and intelligence sharing, its ability to withstand the rising global tide of firearms remains to be seen.  

Journal of Criminology and Forensic Studies, vol. 3(1). 2020.

By Nicolas Florquin

This article reviews research undertaken over the past two decades to support international policy on small arms and light weapons (SALW) – which include firearms – and discusses its relevance to academic debates and policy on gun violence. It examines whether SALW research generated a greater understanding of the most problematic uses and users of firearms, and of the role of different weapons as instruments of violence. SALW research helped shift international policy from armed conflicts to gun violence occurring in a range of developing and post-conflict settings, and in Europe following the 2015–16 terror attacks. This work underscored the proximate weapons sources that armed groups often utilise, and the importance of flows of certain weapons – such as converted firearms – and ammunition in fuelling violence. Undertaking impact evaluations of novel interventions, monitoring the impact of new technologies, and investigating the relationship between ammuni-tion supply and violence are suggested ways forward.

Global Crime, Volume 22, 2021 - Issue 4

By Joseph Blocher, Samuel W. Buell, Jacob D. Charles, and Darrell A.H. Miller  

The American gun debate is increasingly populated with scenes of people pointing and otherwise displaying guns. What is the legal regime governing gun displays, and how well can it address the distinct social and legal problems they pose? In this Essay, we argue that the current structure of criminal law does not supply clear rules of conduct sufficient to avoid the negative effects of gun displays, and that the rhetorical and expressive effects of Second Amendment debates threaten to make the situation worse. We also suggest how the legal rules might be improved, and how battles over norms—as much as criminal prohibitions and defenses—will continue to shape both social practice and law when it comes to displays of firearms in public and towards other persons.

99 Texas Law Review 1173-1200 (2021)

By  Aziz Huq, Robert Vargas & Caitlin Loftus

From May 29, 2020, onward, the City of Chicago witnessed an escalating wave of protests against police violence under the Black Lives Matter (BLM) banner. On one count, some 52,000 people participated in BLM protests in the city. Many hoped that such mobilization “would democratize our politics and embolden our visions for change,” especially when it came to public safety. Yet just over a year later, the Chicago City Council passed Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s municipal budget with a $189 million dollar jump in police funding. That budget received support from several Democratic Socialist alderpeople — previously among BLM’s most vociferous supporters — and many progressive activists. No law forced the council’s or the mayor’s hands. Unlike many other jurisdictions, Chicago does not have a “structural entrenchment” of law enforcement arising from an “insulation of urban police departments” through state legislation. To the contrary, earlier in 2021, Governor Jay Pritzker had signed a “sweeping” criminal justice reform bill partly in response to concerns about racial justice. State-level forces, that is, listed in favor of change. What then happened to defuse the momentum of social change in Chicago?

The answer, we contend in this Essay, has in part to do with guns, and in particular the way that we talk about guns. Through increased rhetoric about illegal guns and heightened enforcement of gun possession laws, Chicago’s mayor and police chief have managed to legitimize an increase in policing that widened racial inequalities at a time of unprecedented pressure from activists. In the teeth of sharp criticism from BLM, Mayor Lightfoot deployed a historically enduring set of arguments about gun violence against liberal, reform-minded political competitors. At the same time, her police superintendent pressed for a set of coercive responses that again had at best questionable effects on gun violence even as they more assuredly reinforced racially stratified patterns of law enforcement. The result has been a shift in policing resources that has increased the disparate burden of policing upon Chicago’s Black and Hispanic communities without much evidence of an offsetting public-safety benefit. This echoes experience in similar past periods of social unrest, when Chicago used gun talk to defuse mobilizing energies of social movements. In 2020, as before, officials tendered both regulatory and coercive interventions in response to the perceived problem of gun violence. The former have tended to wither; the latter endure, even if their effect upon actual rates of gun-related crimes is ambiguous at best.

Harvard Law Review Forum [Vol. 135:473, 2022.

By Joseph Blocher & Reva B. Siegel  

  Is racism in gun regulation reason to look to the Supreme Court to expand Second Amendment rights? While discussion of race and guns recurs across the briefs in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, 1 it is especially prominent in the brief of legal aid attorneys and public defenders2 who employed their Second Amendment arguments to showcase stories of racial bias in the enforcement of New York’s licensing and gun possession laws. Because this Second Amendment claim came from a coalition on the left, it was widely celebrated by gun rights advocates.3 This Essay argues that the racial justice concerns the public defenders highlight should be addressed in democratic politics rather than in the federal courts. We show that problems to which public defenders point are partly attributable to the Court’s decades-long abdication of equal protection oversight of the criminal justice system — its transformation of equal protection into an instrument for protecting majority  rather than minority rights.4 Actors in democratic politics can enforce equal protection in ways that courts have not and they can enforce equal protection in ways that courts cannot, by coordinating multiple racial justice goals, seeking freedom from gun violence in nondiscriminatory law enforcement and transformed, less carceral approaches to public safety.5 Only democratic actors have the institutional competence to integrate these race-egalitarian aims and to experiment with strategies for achieving them. We highlight jurisdictions where there is debate about the best toolkit to achieve inclusive forms of public safety in an era of rising crime.6 None of this is possible if the Court expands Second Amendment rights in ways that deprive communities of the democratic authority they need to coordinate these various compelling public ends 

Harvard Law Review Forum,  Vol. 135:449  2022.