I’ve referenced this Siegel study two or three times in detail, and briefly elsewhere in my writing, and I believe it to be one of the more robust looks at the link between gun homicide rate and gun ownership rate.
The one major flaw in it is he didn’t look at replacement (non-firearm homicide) factors when he did the multivariate analysis. That was an error that he has cleaned up in some later work.
This one is a cleaner look at firearm homicide rates vs total suicide rates, and discovers something that is not at all mentioned in the MS media but should be. Namely that overall suicide rates do vary by gun ownership rate, but only in men, not women:
Both of these used suicide proxy to measure firearm ownership rate, and their references go back to earlier studies by Siegel on how to control that properly. Chase the links back on that.
One fabulous Siegel study that I haven’t had a chance to work into my article rotation yet came out this past year, where they did a time series evaluation of gun policies being implemented, and being rolled back, in different municipalities across the country. The media coverage of it was pretty pop and pretty anti-gun, but the study itself (he did two with different data sets) concluded the same thing. You generally get a drop in firearm homicide rates with some version of (universal background check plus licensing) but no other gun control measures help at all. Feature bans, mag size restrictions, limitations on the type of firearms that are legal, don’t do anything. UBC+license does appear to help some. When I back-of-the-enveloped it to do a sort of projection, it seemed that a nationwide version of this would probably save about 1000 homicides per year. Not much compared to the 40k “gun deaths” number, but a noticeable improvement over the 10k gun homicide number. That study also looked at total homicide rate instead of firearm homicide rate, as his first study linked above should have done.
I don’t have a link handy on those, but you should be able to google it pretty easily. Skip the media puff pieces and try to find the studies themselves.
Siegel’s an interesting character. His most recent media push hasn’t been about firearms at all, it’s been about how the CDC lied about vaping to try and get unnecessary laws regulating nicotine vapes passed which are probably going to harm more people than they help.
