Gun Violence in the United States

My colleagues and I are studying gun violence from two perspectives.  First, how do events like mass shootings impact gun policy?  Do they have any effect?  We find that they do, but not in the way most people would expect. Second, we are studying which types of gun laws might actually lead to fewer gun deaths.  In a recent paper, entitled "Handgun Waiting Periods Reduce Gun Deaths", which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, we find that when states enact "waiting period" laws, this leads to a significant reduction in gun homocides (~17%) and gun suicides (~5-10%).  In addition to examining every change in such policies across all 50 states over 45 years, we also leverage a natural experiment that replicates our results and speaks to the causal relationship between waiting periods and gun deaths.