Scientific American:

After the massacre this week in Sutherland Springs, Texas, that state’s attorney general told Fox News gun control laws will not prevent mass shootings. “This guy violated the laws against murder,” Ken Paxton said of shooter Devin Kelley. “Adding some other gun law would not, I don’t think, in any way change this guy’s behavior.” Former Texas State Senator Jerry Patterson made the same point to The New York Times: “All these window-dressing proposed laws don’t make us safer.”

These claims—repeated across the country—are wrong. The right gun laws do prevent shootings, research strongly indicates. And these laws do not mean confiscating everybody’s guns. Scientific American spoke with Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, Medical Center, and Daniel Webster, director of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Gun Policy and Research, about four feasible legal and policy changes that would be most effective. Here are the life-saving laws and the data that supports them.

One clear flaw in federal gun laws is that prospective buyers do not get background checks when buying from private sellers, only when buying from licensed dealers. An effective solution would be to require people to apply, in-person, at local law enforcement agencies for gun purchase permits. This approach would “make it harder for bad guys to buy guns,” Wintemute says. These laws are already in place for handgun purchases in 10 states and in Washington, D.C. In a 2009 study involving 53 cities Webster and his colleagues found this approach, which gives law enforcement officials discretion about who they gave permits to, was linked with a 68 percent reduced risk of guns being diverted to criminals post-sale. But after Missouri repealed its permit-to-purchase handgun law in 2007, firearm homicide rates increased by 25 percent, a jump that was not seen in neighboring states or the rest of the country, Webster’s team reported. Missouri’s repeal was also linked with a 52 percent increase in handgun murders of law enforcement officers in the line of duty.

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