Firearm Injury Prevention: Understanding Firearm Policy Diffusion, 1993-2010

Abstract

Annually firearms kill more than 30,000 individuals and injure more than 50,000 individuals, resulting in costs of $45 million to over $1 billion in the United States. Traditionally firearms were addressed as a criminal justice problem, but for more than 30 years, public health and injury prevention specialists have worked to address the problem of firearm injuries through surveillance, education, research, and laws. Firearm legislation is multijurisdictional across the federal, state, and local governments, but the majority of activity is at the state levels. Firearm injury prevention efforts must navigate a politically diverse arena dominated by social regulatory politics in order to affect change. This study presents newly analyzed data on seven firearms laws: child access prevention, minimum age to purchase/possess a handgun, stand your ground, large capacity ammunition limits, Saturday night specials and assault weapons bans. A goal of the study was to create a 50 states longitudinal dataset in order to investigate the relationship between internal state political and demographics characteristics and firearm policy diffusion. The study findings are presented across three manuscripts, which address the trends of enactment of the laws, the analysis of the six gun control laws, and an analysis of one permissive firearm law (stand your ground laws). A panel data set was created from publicly available sources for each state from 1993 to 2010. General Estimating Equations (GEE) were used to evaluate the impact of citizen pressures, lobby pressures, legislative characteristics, and demographic data on the adoption of the seven selected laws. Study findings identified waves of adoption of the firearm laws across politically and demographically similar states in the early study years (1993-94) and the later study years (2005-10). States with Democratic state governments were more likely to pass gun control laws while states with Republican state governments were more likely to pass stand your ground laws. Poverty was also a statistically significant variable for the passage of the laws: states with lower poverty levels were more likely to pass gun control laws while states with higher poverty levels were more likely to pass stand your ground laws. However, aside from legislation to ensure consistency with federal law, most states are not responding to the public call for regulation as measured by the enactment of the selected laws. Instead, a trend of permissive firearms laws is rapidly spreading across the 50 states. Firearm injury prevention advocates should not be deterred by political environments. Rather, they should respond to cues to optimize change for injury prevention. Understanding mechanisms for firearm policy adoption, such as the role of legislative characteristics may help researchers and firearm injury prevention advocates focus limited resources to introduce bills in policy-friendly states. This dissertation contributes to the firearm injury prevention literature by applying policy diffusion theories and analysis techniques to firearm injury prevention efforts. Findings support the literature that internal state political and demographic characteristics guide the adoption of firearm laws.