It’s becoming increasingly clear that Americans have, on the whole, been safer from violence so far this year than any other since before the pandemic.
There were fewer homicides and domestic violence incidents in the first half of 2024 than in the same period in 2019, a report last month from the Council on Criminal Justice found. And the latest data from more than 200 of the nation’s largest cities indicate that homicides are down more than 17 percent this year compared to last.
That’s nearly a thousand fewer lives lost in just the first seven months of 2024.
The drop in violent crime means a drop in gun violence — and vice versa — because the vast majority of homicides involve firearms. Preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention corroborates that, showing a significant decrease in gun deaths in 2023, largely because of reductions in firearm homicides and a marked slowing of a years-long increase in firearm suicides.
The decline has been recent, and intense. A combination of factors is likely contributing to it, including a return to pre-pandemic norms and substantial investments in violence prevention strategies. The trend also raises a complex question: Are gun laws playing a role?
It’s too early to tell whether specific laws have influenced the current drop in violence. But a significant update to the most comprehensive look at the effects of gun laws out there — the RAND Corporation’s “The Science of Gun Policy” report — could help our understanding.
The report — first published in 2018 and updated regularly since — is a meta-analysis that explores more than 200 combinations of policies, from background checks to carry laws, and related outcomes, like violent crime or suicide. In a line of study where very few effects can be authoritatively linked back to causes, RAND’s report has long been respected among gun policy researchers and gun violence prevention advocates as a panoramic accounting of the state of the field.
Previous versions of the report found evidence that background checks, domestic violence-related gun prohibitions, and waiting periods may reduce gun violence. But the latest update includes some notable findings, too.
There’s now supportive evidence — RAND’s strongest designation — that minimum age requirements for purchasing a gun reduce firearm suicides among young people. And Child Access Prevention Laws, a type of safer storage law, continue to demonstrate robust effectiveness in reducing firearm suicides, unintentional shootings, and violent crime.
“I think it’s interesting that both of those are targeting an age at which people might be particularly vulnerable to harms from gun violence,” said Rosanna Smart, who oversees the RAND meta-analysis. “For a while, we’ve found the evidence to be pretty robust that those types of laws or safe storage laws more broadly can reduce various forms of firearm injury and death among youth.”
RAND is conservative in awarding its three main evidentiary designations: limited, moderate, and supportive. Few policy-outcome pairs receive anything more than an “inconclusive,” reflecting the difficulty of examining policies intended to reduce gun violence and violent crime, as well as the limited number of academic studies that RAND can review.
For example, there’s still not enough research to say with real confidence whether Extreme Risk Protection Order laws reduce mass shootings or firearm homicides. But there is now limited evidence that ERPO laws — more commonly known as red flag laws — reduce not only firearm suicides, but suicides overall.
RAND found that limited evidence despite the fact that ERPO laws were “almost frustrating to include in this report,” Smart said, “just because there’s so much variability across states in how these laws have been implemented and variation within states.” Smart added: “Drawing strong generalizable conclusions about what the effects of this law would be if a new state decided to implement it, it’s just really hard to say.”
There’s also limited evidence that licensing and permitting requirements may decrease mass shootings, and that domestic violence misdemeanor prohibitions may decrease gun-related intimate partner homicides. In previous versions of the meta-analysis, there was inconclusive evidence or no studies that met RAND’s inclusion criteria on those topics.
RAND Corporation
But Smart was quick to advise against dismissing policies with limited or inconclusive evidence: “Just because evidence is limited or inconclusive, or just because the evidence is weak, it does not by any stretch of the imagination mean that the laws aren’t effective or that they’re not worth trying.”
The meta-analysis looks at the effects of particular gun policies in isolation, but another new study from RAND, led by Smart and researcher Terry Schell, explored the combined effects of multiple gun laws. This study found that states with the most restrictive gun policies had a 20 percent lower firearm mortality rate compared to states with the most permissive laws.
This suggests that comprehensive policy approaches may be more effective than individual policies in reducing gun violence.
“Our understanding of the effects of individual gun policies on various outcomes remains holistically quite limited, particularly compared to other areas of social policy and broader violence and crime,” Smart said. “But there were a few places where the new literature was such to strengthen our conclusions or increase our confidence in what the likely effects of these laws might be.”
The updated meta-analysis reviewed more than 180 academic studies — adding more than 30 new studies from the previous version. That reflects a growth in the field of gun violence research, which is beginning to flourish thanks to restored federal funding and more diverse scholarship.
“There’s definitely continued growth of literature in the broader gun policy evaluation space,” Smart said. “On the methodological quality of studies, there’s certainly more of a focus on using more rigorous public inference methods in a lot of the space, and that’s really nice to see.”
