Handgun waiting periods reduce gun deaths

Abstract

Handgun waiting periods are laws that impose a delay between the initiation of a purchase and final acquisition of a firearm. We show that waiting periods, which create a "cooling off" period among buyers, significantly reduce the incidence of gun violence. We estimate the impact of waiting periods on gun deaths, exploiting all changes to state-level policies in the Unites States since 1970. We find that waiting periods reduce gun homicides by roughly 17%. We provide further support for the causal impact of waiting periods on homicides by exploiting a natural experiment resulting from a federal law in 1994 that imposed a temporary waiting period on a subset of states.

Keywords: gun policy; gun violence; injury prevention; waiting period.

Fig. 1.

States with handgun waiting periods and background checks on dealer sales from 1970 to 2015. Many states were required to implement these policies during the Brady interim period between February 1994 and November 1998 (shaded gray). Following prior research (8), Alabama and Ohio are coded as not requiring background checks after the Supreme Court’s decision in Printz v. United States. Not all states had waiting periods during the Brady interim period because they implemented or already had an instant background check system that obviated the need for a waiting period to investigate gun buyers.

Fig. S1.

Estimates of the effect of waiting periods on gun homicides and suicides, dropping each state individually from the analysis and reestimating model 3 of Table 1. Bars are 1.96 ± SE of the waiting period coefficient. Solid lines mark the full sample estimates, and dashed lines are 1.96 ± full sample SE.