Gun Control Won't Stop Violence, but It Can Limit It

Guns dramatically affect the public's health. In 1991, more than 38,000 homicides, suicides and accidental deaths were caused by firearms in the United States. For every death, there are more than seven non-fatal injuries, or more than 250,000 gun injuries annually. The burden that firearm deaths and injuries place on the economy is staggering -- an estimated $20.4 billion in lifetime costs in 1990, including $1.4 billion in direct health-care expenditures.

Faced with these grim statistics, the public and the media have expressed a dramatically increased interest in the epidemic of gun violence in the United States. Legislators have responded by proposing and enacting many different kinds of laws. In most cases, these laws attempt to limit access to some kinds of guns for all or some people. New proposals, including licensing prospective handgun purchasers, are expected to play an important role in Maryland's next legislative session.

As new gun laws are proposed, however, people should reasonably ask, ''Will this law work?'' As public-health researchers who study gun violence and the policies to prevent it, we try to answer precisely this kind of question. Some of the different kinds of gun laws have not yet been carefully evaluated. Nevertheless, from the several well designed studies that have been done, a pattern emerges. Laws that impose broad restrictions on access to guns are associated with fewer gun deaths and injuries.

John Sloan and his colleagues studied the effects of laws regulating the sale of handguns in Seattle, Washington, and Vancouver, Canada. Although the two cities are quite similar in many ways, they differ greatly in their regulation of handguns. In Seattle, handguns could be purchased easily for self-defense or recreation. In Vancouver, gun buyers were required to obtain a special permit, and self-defense was not a valid reason to obtain such a permit. As a result, Seattle residents own many more handguns than do citizens of Vancouver.

Dr. Sloan found that the two cities had very similar rates of homicide committed with weapons other than handguns. But Seattle had a much higher overall homicide rate, because a citizen of Seattle was nearly five times more likely to be murdered with a handgun than was his neighbor in Vancouver. Also, young people in Seattle had a far higher suicide rate than their counterparts in Vancouver -- largely because 15- to 24 year-olds were 10 times more likely to kill themselves with a handgun in Seattle than in Vancouver.