More Reasons to Doubt Study Claiming Permissive Gun Laws Endanger Kids

A couple of days ago, I wrote about a study that essentially claimed respecting the Second Amendment resulted in children being killed. I called BS, of course, because it is, but I didn’t have much to go on. The study itself wasn’t exactly open for public examination, so I had to rely on what was reported in the media.

But that report was lacking in specifics, so I had to make do.

Luckily, Scientific American–a publication that hasn’t missed an opportunity to try and push a particular party’s narrative in recent years–decided to take a look at the study.

And boy, are we about to have some fun.

The new study, published on Monday in JAMA Pediatrics, compared gun deaths in U.S. states before and after the landmark Supreme Court case McDonald v. City of Chicago. The Court’s 2010 decision limited states’ ability to regulate gun access, and many states loosened firearm ownership requirements after the ruling.

The researchers sorted each U.S. state into one of three categories—”strict,” “permissive” and “most permissive”—based on its firearm laws. Relatively strict states had requirements such as safety trainings, background checks and waiting periods. They also tended to ban assault weapons and certain gun-enhancing hardware such as bump stocks (which can make a rifle fire much more rapidly). The more permissive states had limited requirements for gun ownership, as well as laws that allowed the concealed carry of firearms with or without a permit, the use of deadly force as self-defense (such as via “stand your ground” laws), and more.

The researchers compared each state’s rate of pediatric deaths from firearms between 1999 and 2010 with the rate during the period between 2011 and 2023 using data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of the 49 states with adequate data, firearm death rates increased significantly in 33 states, 31 of which were considered “permissive” or “most permissive.” Rates decreased significantly in four states, all of which were considered “strict.”

First, let’s understand that McDonald simply said that the Second Amendment applied to states and local governments. They couldn’t ban guns, which Chicago had essentially done by requiring handguns to be registered, then refusing to accept registration. McDonald might have been a landmark ruling, but it was also pretty limited, which is illustrated by the fact that California and New York have gotten progressively more restrictive since then.

While some states have become more permissive since then, it had nothing at all to do with McDonald. Using that as your jumping off point makes no sense…unless you’d already looked at the homicide numbers.

See, from 1999 to 2010, when the McDonald decision was handed down, we were at a pretty low point with regard to homicides. For several years after McDonald, that continued for quite some time. It wasn’t until 2014 when the homicide rate started ticking up a bit, with a massive spike starting in 2020 that was on par with what we saw in 1997 and earlier.

If McDonald was some jumping off point for everything going sideways, then why did it drop even more, such as in 2013 and 2014, which were fairly historic lows?

Then there are other outliers.

There are two notable outliers in the data—Illinois and Connecticut. These two states were in the strict category but had significant increases in death rate. For Illinois, “I don’t have a great explanation, but someone should look into that,” Faust says. Yet “if you exclude one day from Connecticut, the Sandy Hook massacre, you don’t have an increase.” The school shooting, which occurred in 2012 and killed 20 children and six adults, led to the stricter gun laws that Connecticut has today.

But you can’t do that, though, can you?

Because if you exclude Sandy Hook, you also need to exclude Uvalde from Texas and Parkland from Florida, don’t you? If you do that, do they still have an increase?

Of course, that’s not answered, and the fact that the researcher doesn’t have an explanation is at least an honest admission. The thing is, though, the fact that these outliers exist suggests, at least on some level, that the claim doesn’t hold up nearly as well as some might like for us to believe.

And what they didn’t look at was whether the guns were lawfully purchased or not. I’m sure they didn’t have access to the data, but still…

Then we have the fact that we have no information about other weapons. Did stabbing deaths among juveniles also increase? That’s an important point, I’d imagine, since that would tell us it’s not about gun laws.

Like so many other studies we’ve seen from so-called gun researchers, this one looks to have cherry-picked data in order to make a point rather than actually look for the truth.