Thanks to congressional Republicans, we just don’t have much reliable information about gun violence and the effects of gun laws in the United States. For the sin of finding a result the National Rifle Association didn't like, Congress has blocked the Centers for Disease Control from researching gun violence for more than two decades. That information blockade is taking a hit, though, with the release of a major new study from the nonpartisan RAND Corporation looking at all the best, most rigorous studies of gun laws. And guess what? While there isn’t nearly enough solid information, what there is suggests that stronger gun laws work:
On the gun control front, there’s moderate evidence that background checks reduce suicide and violent crime, limited evidence that prohibitions associated with mental illness reduce suicide, moderate evidence that those prohibitions reduce violent crime, and supportive evidence that child-access prevention laws reduce suicides and unintentional injuries and deaths.
Meanwhile, there’s limited evidence that concealed carry laws increase violent crime and unintentional injuries and deaths. And there’s moderate evidence that “stand your ground” laws — NRA-backed measures that expand when someone can use a gun or other weapons to defend himself — increase violent crime.
If you put this all together, it suggests that restrictive laws seem to lead to fewer gun deaths, while the permissive laws seem to lead to more gun deaths.
But those results are pretty tentative because, again, thanks to Congress, there aren’t many rigorous studies on gun laws and gun violence. Which is where the RAND study’s biggest conclusion comes in:
It argues that this freeze has, by making it difficult to conduct better studies, led to a confusing empirical environment, where it’s easy for groups on both sides of the debate to cite shoddy work that supports their prior beliefs.
“The studies that have been done often reach opposite conclusions to each other,” Andrew Morral, the head of RAND’s gun policy initiative, told me. The lack of thorough research, he added, “creates this kind of fact-free environment in which people can cherry-pick any study that happens to support what their priors are on the effects of the law.”
Congressional Republicans need to allow the CDC to fund gun research. Let them show that they believe what they’re saying about the benefits of concealed carry and how people need guns to protect themselves. The fact that they won’t allow the research shows how dishonest the Republican pro-gun arguments are. Just one more way Republicans benefit from suppressing information.