State-Level Firearm-Safety Laws at the Turn of the 21st Century.
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- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 42176757.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1016/j.amepre.2026.108432.
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Abstract
This research methods article provides researchers with a user-friendly, historical database and trend analysis of state-level firearm safety laws over the past 25 years. Researchers compiled 146 firearm-safety laws in all 50 states from 1999 to 2023. A team of lawyers and policy researchers coded state laws to create a binary database indicating whether each state had the law for each year, yielding 1,250 state-year observations. This database is accompanied by a descriptive analysis completed in 2025, which highlights future methodologic use cases. Fifteen states had 20 or more additional firearm-safety laws in 2023 than in 1999, whereas 14 states had fewer firearm-safety laws in 2023. The total number of laws summed across all 50 states rose from 1,771 in 1999 to 2,367 in 2023. Laws designed to keep firearms out of the hands of select individuals saw the greatest increase over the period. This resource provides granular, updated, and categorized information on the landscape of firearm-safety laws across the U.S. over a 25-year period. Researchers can use this database to rigorously analyze the relationship between firearm-safety laws and societal outcomes by pairing it with social determinant, health, demographic, and law enforcement data.