A new study by a few Harvard professors found that requiring a waiting period for someone to own a gun could reduce firearm homicides by 17 percent.
Handgun waiting periods are laws that impose a delay between the initiation of a purchase and final acquisition of a firearm. We show that waiting periods, which create a “cooling off” period among buyers, significantly reduce the incidence of gun violence. We estimate the impact of waiting periods on gun deaths, exploiting all changes to state-level policies in the Unites States since 1970. We find that waiting periods reduce gun homicides by roughly 17%. We provide further support for the causal impact of waiting periods on homicides by exploiting a natural experiment resulting from a federal law in 1994 that imposed a temporary waiting period on a subset of states.
But what if you want your gun now?!?!?!?!
"What we show, pretty definitively, is that a waiting-period law can significantly reduce the number of gun homicides," says Deepak Malhotra, one of three Harvard Business School professors who worked on the study, which appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "It does seem to create a cooling-off period that leads to this reduction."
Outside experts say Malhotra and his team's work strengthens the evidence that waiting periods save lives. Crime researcher Phil Cook rated the science behind waiting periods as now being at "a B or B-plus"; epidemiologist Cassandra Crifasi says, "With this study, we are approaching pretty darn convincing."
Now, listen. This is not a definitive study. It is just another piece of evidence that suggests we can try to do very common-sense things to try and reduce the epidemic-level of gun homicide in our country. I know that diehard Second Amendment zealots will argue that when President Obama and his secret New World Order forces come for your guns, you’ll be sad that you have to wait for a few days while … the secret government that controls everything and stages all of the mass shootings in our country, the same forces that can control virtually any and all information being put out into the world, is somehow finally able to use the waiting period to take your guns.