States with looser gun laws experienced a rise in pediatric deaths from firearm injuries between 2011 and 2023, whereas states with stricter laws did not. That’s according to a new study published in JAMA Pediatrics.
Researchers examined firearm deaths of children 17 and under in the period after a 2010 landmark Supreme Court case—McDonald v. Chicago—which ruled that state and local governments must comply with the Second Amendment. Chicago’s law banning ownership of handguns was struck down, but cities and states could still regulate guns. That led to states across the country changing their gun laws, says study author Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency medicine professor at Harvard Medical School and a physician at Mass General Brigham.
“There is just this flurry of activity and it’s in both directions,” Faust told National Public Radio. “You have states like Alabama or Louisiana and Texas, that are enacting much more aggressive laws in terms of freedom of access, freedom of carry laws about concealed carry in churches, laws about stand-your-ground, other things that make it just easier to get a firearm quickly and to carry.” Other states, like Colorado, passed stricter gun laws in the following years.
Faust and his colleagues grouped states into three buckets based on their gun laws: most permissive, permissive and least permissive; and looked at the overall pediatric firearm deaths in the three groups from 2011 to 2023 compared to the decade prior. States with the most permissive gun laws had more than 6,000 excess deaths than they would have expected based on the earlier time period. States in the middle group, with laws considered permissive, also saw an increase in deaths, with 1,500 more than expected.
The next step for researchers is to look at which specific laws can really help prevent gun deaths in kids and teens, said Dr. Maya Haasz, an emergency medicine doctor and researcher at the University of Colorado, who wasn’t involved in the new study.
For example, past studies have shown that ‘child access prevention laws,’ such as safe storage laws, are effective in preventing injuries and deaths, Haasz said. “Those laws have been shown to decrease suicides and unintentional injuries in children,” she says.
Colorado has a law for safe firearm storage in homes since 2021, and for safe storage in vehicles since 2024.
