Untangling Gun Fatalities, Mental Illnesses and State-Level Firearm Policies

• In Event: Policymaking and Responsiveness in States and Localities

Abstract

Due to constant mass shootings across the country, there has been a significant increase in gun-related policymaking at the state level in the past decade. Previous literature has found that restrictive firearm policies are associated with lower gun-related fatalities. However, in recent years, news media and prominent political practitioners such as Barack Obama and Donald Trump have associated gun deaths, particularly those from mass shootings, with mental illnesses even though scholars have argued that mental health is not a determinant of firearm-arm related violence. Hence, this study tests two competing hypotheses about firearm-related fatalities –one dealing with restrictive gun policies and another dealing with mental health policies– across the U.S. states from 2012 to 2015. Through a series of panel data analyses, I find that distinguishing between types of firearm-related fatalities helps untangle the relationship between gun and health-related policies and their relationship with death rates. On one hand, both a large number of restrictive gun policies and health expenditures per capita are associated with an overall decrease on firearm-related fatalities at the state-level. However, when disjointed, restrictive gun policies are a significant factor only for suicides committed with guns, whereas policies do not play a significant role for firearm homicide rates. Most importantly, this study finds that in addition to policies, analyses of gun fatalities at the state-level should include political and demographic factors such as political ideology and ethno-racial composition of the population, as they play significant roles in predicting firearm-related deaths.

Author

• Barbara Gomez-Aguinaga, University of Nebraska Omaha