Gauging the impact of gun background checks

Castillo-Carniglia and coauthors1 make a valuable contribution to the field of violence prevention by examining the wave of states that newly require background checks for all gun sales. Their critical examination of this policy, for which their own prior research provided essential support, attests to their commitment to developing effective measures for reducing gun violence. Still, their observation that the enacted laws were not associated with increased numbers of total recorded background checks should be interpreted carefully, given the limited data on which they rely—caution absent from press coverage of the study (‘Gun laws that cost millions had little effect because they weren’t enforced’).2

The authors set to infer whether private gun sales were increasingly subject to background checks by examining Federal Bureau of Investigation data on total gun sales subject to background checks, of which private sales represent but a fraction. As the authors noted, in some…

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