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Over the past decade and a half, states with permissive firearm laws saw a rise in gun-related deaths in kids. That's according to a new study published in JAMA Pediatrics. NPR's Rhitu Chatterjee reports.
RHITU CHATTERJEE, BYLINE: Since 2020, guns have become the leading cause of death in children and teens in the United States, killing more kids every year than car accidents. The rise in these deaths began shortly after a landmark 2010 Supreme Court case that led many states to change their gun laws.
JEREMY FAUST: After 2010, there is just this flurry of activity.
CHATTERJEE: Lead study author Dr. Jeremy Faust is an emergency physician and professor at Harvard Medical School.
FAUST: You will have states like Alabama or Louisiana and Texas that are enacting much more aggressive laws in terms of freedom of access, freedom of carry, concealed carry in churches, laws about stand your ground.
CHATTERJEE: Other states, like California, tightened their firearm laws.
FAUST: Things like safety training requirements, or places instituted waiting periods or background checks to make sure that they didn't have a violent criminal offense in their recent past.
CHATTERJEE: Faust and his team grouped states into three buckets based on their gun laws - most permissive, permissive and least permissive. Then they looked at the overall pediatric firearm deaths in the three groups from 2011 to 2023 compared to the decade before.
FAUST: In the most permissive states, it's a 67% relative increase.
CHATTERJEE: In the second group, the permissive states, there was a 52% rise in pediatric deaths.
FAUST: On one hand, you have 7,400 more deaths than should have happened in these states that have loosened their gun laws. That's over 500 per year. These are not deaths that should have occurred. They are preventable.
CHATTERJEE: Meanwhile, the states with tougher gun regulations did not see a rise in deaths.
MAYA HAASZ: What it's showing is that states that have overall stricter gun laws, we are not seeing the same increases of death as states that have permissive gun laws.
CHATTERJEE: Dr. Maya Haasz is an emergency physician and researcher at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. She wasn't involved in the new study and says its findings show there's a path to keeping kids safe from gun violence.
HAASZ: This doesn't mean we should change all our laws at once, but it says, perhaps if we could look at these laws and see which ones are effective, then we could start moving towards safety.
CHATTERJEE: Rhitu Chatterjee, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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