By Ari Davis, Rose Kim, Cassandra Crifasi

Gun violence is an ongoing public health crisis in the United States that impacts the health and wellbeing of all of us. In 2020, during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. experienced an unprecedented spike in gun homicides. Many believed that this spike would be short-lived; levels of gun violence would subside as institutions effectively responded to the pandemic and people returned to their daily routines. This, unfortunately, was not the case. In 2021, for the second straight year, gun deaths reached the highest number ever recorded. Nearly 49,000 people died from gun violence in the U.S. in 2021. Each day, an average of 134 people died from gun violence—one death every 11 minutes. Gun homicides continued to rise in 2021, increasing 7.6% over the previous year. Gun suicides reached record levels, increasing 8.3%, the largest one-year increase recorded in over four decades. Guns, once again, were the leading cause of death among children and teens in 2021 accounting for more deaths than COVID-19, car crashes, or cancers. Coincident with the rise in gun-related deaths were record gun sales. Millions of first-time purchasers, including Black and Hispanic/Latino people, and women of all races and ethnicities, bought guns during the pandemic at unprecedented levels. Many of these purchasers were motivated by gun industry marketing claims that guns make you safer. Yet, this is far from the truth; gun ownership greatly increases the risk of dying by suicide and homicide. While it is too early to tell whether this surge in gun purchases contributed directly to the rise in gun violence the country is experiencing, we know that over the long run this influx of guns will only exacerbate the public health crisis of gun violence and worsen health disparities

Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health 2023. 45p.

By Northeastern University, School of Law, Legal Skills in Social Context In Conjunction with Stop Handgun Violence

Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs) are civil orders that allow law enforcement to temporarily remove firearms and ammunition from persons who pose a danger to themselves or others. ERPOs address the critical problem posed when individuals are at risk of harming themselves or others with firearms but have not yet committed an action that warrants law enforcement’s involvement. ERPOs are a relatively new legislative tool, with only seventeen states and the District of Columbia having ERPO laws, the majority of which were adopted in 2018. Given that ERPO legislation is relatively new in the majority of jurisdictions, states are still in the process of implementing and developing law enforcement and court protocols to enforce ERPOs. Additionally, there is limited information available about ERPO effectiveness in implementation. This paper collects existing information about ERPO implementation across jurisdictions and uses comparative analysis with the broader gun control landscape to draw inferences about potential legal challenges to ERPOs and social justice implications of the laws. Other resources exist that provide information about ERPOs; however, this paper poses a novel approach in that it is grounded in a social justice lens with the principle that ERPO laws must not only be evaluated in terms of technical execution, but must also be examined closely for potential disparities in utilization and enforcement…

Boston: Northeastern University, 2020. 125p.

Veronica A Pear, Rocco Pallin, Julia P Schleimer, Elizabeth Tomsich, Nicole Kravitz-Wirtz, Aaron B Shev, Christopher E Knoepke, and Garen J Wintemute

Background Gun violence restraining orders (GVROs), implemented in California in 2016, temporarily prohibit individuals at high risk of violence from purchasing or possessing firearms and ammunition. We sought to describe the circumstances giving rise to GVROs issued 2016–2018, provide details about the GVRO process and quantify mortality outcomes for individuals subject to these orders (‘respondents’). Methods For this cross-sectional description of GVRO respondents, 2016–2018, we abstracted case details from court files and used LexisNexis to link respondents to mortality data through August 2020.

Results We abstracted information for 201 respondents with accessible court records. Respondents were mostly white (61.2%) and men (93.5%). Fifty-four per cent of cases involved potential harm to others alone, 15.3% involved potential harm to self alone and 25.2% involved both. Mass shooting threats occurred in 28.7% of cases. Ninety-six and one half percent of petitioners were law enforcement officers and one-in-three cases resulted in arrest on order service. One-year orders after a hearing (following 21-day emergency/temporary orders) were issued in 53.5% of cases. Most (84.2%) respondents owned at least one firearm, and firearms were removed in 55.9% of cases. Of the 379 respondents matched by LexisNexis, 7 (1.8%) died after the GVRO was issued: one from a self-inflicted firearm injury that was itself the reason for the GVRO and the others from causes unrelated to violence.

Injury Prevention, 2022.

By Rod K. Brunson , Brian A. Wade , Brooklynn K. Hitchens

Precarious firearm conduct among inexperienced gun possessors has the potential to intensify firearm-related fatalities and injuries. The current study involves face-to-face interviews with 51 high-risk (and prohibited) residents of Brooklyn and the Bronx, NY, each of whom have either been shot or shot at. We analyze study participants’ lived experiences regarding urban gun violence (including as victims and perpetrators), firearm handling, sharing, and improper storage. Despite claiming to be knowledgeable about firearm fundamentals, the vast majority of respondents acknowledged never having received professional instruction, but rather “figured it out” by “playing around” with available guns. These informal methods were shaped by respondents’ desire to arm themselves despite inadequate access to firearm training. Study participants also described routinely stashing firearms in unsecure, easily accessible locations. Our study findings have important implications for informing community-based harm reduction and safety strategies among persons within high-risk networks.

Preventive Medicine, Volume 165, Part A, December 2022

By Anthony A Braga , Rod K Brunson , Philip J Cook , Brandon Turchan , Brian Wade

New York City (NYC) has experienced large reductions in violent crime over the last two decades, but gun-related violence continues to pose a threat to public safety. Despite strong gun laws, high-risk individuals in NYC neighborhoods are unfortunately still able to access and misuse firearms. This research analyzes NYC's underground gun market by closely examining the flow of guns into the two boroughs where gun violence and crime gun recoveries are most prevalent: the Bronx and Brooklyn. A mixed methods approach is utilized that consists of an assessment of firearms trace data and in-depth interviews with individuals considered to be at high risk for involvement in gun violence. Findings suggest that guns recovered in the Bronx and Brooklyn were significantly more likely to originate in states with less restrictive gun laws and more likely to have changed ownership in unregulated transactions relative to guns recovered elsewhere in NYC. Interviews revealed three primary avenues for illegal guns reaching Bronx and Brooklyn neighborhoods: high-volume gun brokers, middlemen, and individuals who make episodic low-level acquisitions from straw purchasers in other states. No subjects identified theft as a meaningful source of crime guns.

J Urban Health (2021) 98:596–608

Sarah Moshary, Bradley Shapiro & Sara Drango

This paper estimates consumer demand for firearms with the aim of predicting the likely impacts of firearm regulations on the number and types of guns in circulation. We first conduct a stated-choice-based conjoint analysis and estimate an individual-level demand model for firearms. We validate our estimates using aggregate moments from observational data. Next, we use our estimates to simulate changes in the number and types of guns in circulation under alternative regulations. Importantly, we find that bans or restrictions that specifically target “assault weapons” increase demand for handguns, which are associated with the vast majority of firearm-related violence. We provide distributions of consumer surplus under counterfactuals and discuss how those distributions could be useful for crafting policy.

Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), 2023. 

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.