Ain’t no Silver Bullet? Gun Laws and Suicide in the US

Joshua Ball (), Günther G. Schulze () and Nikita Zakharov ()
Additional contact information
Nikita Zakharov: Department of International Economic Policy, University of Freiburg

Discussion Paper Series from Department of International Economic Policy, University of Freiburg

Abstract: We revisit the effect of gun laws on suicide rates in the US states in the past 30 years by departing from the correlational analysis inherent in the previous literature and, instead, leveraging an instrumental variable (IV) approach based on policy convergences between contiguous states. The empirical analysis relies on the estimated gun law stringency constructed as the number of gun laws per state-year. Our causal results show that the gun control stringency significantly reduces firearm suicide rates (both in correlational and IV estimations), corroborating previous findings; yet this decline does not translate into fewer overall suicides – contrary to what was previously found in correlational studies. This novel finding suggests that gun laws are not effective in curbing overall suicide rates.

Keywords: Gun laws; Suicides; Endogeneity; Instrumental variables; US states. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20 pages
Date: 2024-12, Revised 2024-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.iep.uni-freiburg.de/discussion-papers/ ... uicide_in_the_us.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fre:wpaper:51

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper Series from Department of International Economic Policy, University of Freiburg Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Günther G. Schulze ().