The social, economic and human costs of firearm violence, including nearly 40,000 deaths annually, are unevenly distributed, with certain population subgroups disproportionately impacted by firearms homicides and suicides. Despite the scale and scope of firearm violence, serious gaps in available data measuring firearm ownership across population strata over time undermine our ability to evaluate drivers of these health disparities or to evaluate firearm safety policies and interventions. As such, prior research examining changes in violence exposure associated with gender or race, or evaluating the efficacy of gun safety policies, has typically ignored large differences in firearm ownership rates across population strata, or has relied on weak cross-sectional analyses with highly aggregated, state-level measures of firearm ownership. These procedures render many analyses of differential firearms violence risk and of the causal effects of policies ambiguous. This project, which falls under Funding Option A, will use small-area estimation techniques to generate informative estimates of household firearm ownership within strata defined by gender, race, marital status, urbanicity, and state, over the period 1980-2020. These constructed measures will be used to investigate the extent to which mortality disparities are associated with differences in rates of firearm ownership, leveraging the longitudinal nature of our data to better describe dynamics over time between firearm ownership and firearm mortality outcomes. Findings will inform how firearm ownership varies across populations, communities, and time; and how this variation relates to differential firearm homicide and suicide risk among subgroups. Better understanding these relationships is critical to the development and implementation of effective gun safety interventions (Objective One). Finally, we will use our new measures of firearm ownership to conduct innovative and more sensitive and precise evaluations of the effects of policies designed to improve firearm safety. By allowing policy impacts to depend on the levels of firearm ownership across a large number of population strata, our approach improves causal identification of policy effects for those laws that target the safety behavior of gun owners, and it better captures both inter-state and sub-state variability in mortality outcomes (Objective Two). This study thus addresses both objectives of RFA-CE-20-006 by providing novel and rigorous evidence on demographic and geographic trends in firearm ownership, on potentially heterogeneous relationships between changes in firearm ownership and changes in firearm deaths, and on the effectiveness of gun safety policies.
This project estimates household firearm ownership rates within multiple population strata over the period 1980-2020. It uses these estimates to investigate health disparities in firearms suicide and homicide, and to improve estimation the effects of firearm safety policies. This information will help to identify policies that improve gun safety, and support development of new programs that can reduce gun violence.
