Citation

Luca M, Malhotra D, Poliquin C. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2017; 114(46): 12162-12165.

Affiliation

Harvard Business School, Boston, MA 02163.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, National Academy of Sciences)

DOI

10.1073/pnas.1619896114

PMID

29078268

Abstract

Handgun waiting periods are laws that impose a delay between the initiation of a purchase and final acquisition of a firearm. We show that waiting periods, which create a "cooling off" period among buyers, significantly reduce the incidence of gun violence. We estimate the impact of waiting periods on gun deaths, exploiting all changes to state-level policies in the Unites States since 1970. We find that waiting periods reduce gun homicides by roughly 17%. We provide further support for the causal impact of waiting periods on homicides by exploiting a natural experiment resulting from a federal law in 1994 that imposed a temporary waiting period on a subset of states.

Copyright © 2017 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.

Language: en

Keywords

gun policy; gun violence; injury prevention; waiting period