Do Studies Show Gun Control Works?

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After reaching historic lows in the mid-2010s, gun violence rates in America have gone up in recent years, and they remain higher than in some other parts of the developed world. There are hundreds of laws and regulations at the federal and state level that restrict Americans' access to guns, yet according to some advocates, social science research shows that a few more "simple, commonsense" laws could significantly reduce the number of injuries and deaths attributed to firearms.

There has been a massive research effort going back decades to determine whether gun control measures work. A 2020 analysis by the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization, parsed the results of 27,900 research publications on the effectiveness of gun control laws. From this vast body of work, the RAND authors found only 123 studies, or 0.4 percent, that tested the effects rigorously. Some of the other 27,777 studies may have been useful for non-empirical discussions, but many others were deeply flawed.

We took a look at the significance of the 123 rigorous empirical studies and what they actually say about the efficacy of gun control laws.

The answer: nothing. The 123 studies that met RAND's criteria may have been the best of the 27,900 analyzed, but they still had serious statistical defects, such as a lack of controls, too many parameters or hypotheses for the data, undisclosed data, erroneous data, misspecified models, and other issues.