effect of child access prevention laws on non-fatal gun injuries
By: Jeff DeSimone, Sara Markowitz.
Contributors: Markowitz, Sara.; National Bureau of Economic Research.
Series: NBER working paper series -- no. 11613.; Working paper series (National Bureau of Economic Research) -- working paper no. 11613.
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Cambridge, MA
Language: eng
Number of pages: 27
Subjects: Firearms -- Law and legislation -- United States; Firearms accidents -- United States -- Prevention
Description: "Many states have passed child access prevention (CAP) laws, which hold the gun owner responsible if a child gains access to a gun that is not securely stored.  Previous CAP law research has focused exclusively on gun-related deaths even though most gun injuries are not fatal.  We use annual hospital discharge data from 1988-2001 to investigate whether CAP laws decrease non-fatal gun injuries.  Results from Poisson regressions that control for various hospital, county and state characteristics, including state-specific fixed effects and time trends, indicate that CAP laws substantially reduce non-fatal gun injuries among both children and adults.  Our interpretation of the estimates as causal impacts is supported by the absence of effects on self-inflicted gun injuries among adults, non-gun self-inflicted injuries, and knife assaults, the failure of violent crime levels and law leads to attain significance or alter estimated law coefficients, and larger coefficient magnitudes in states where the law covers older children"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.
Notes: "September 2005."

Includes bibliographical references (p. 20-21)

Also available online.