TY  - JOUR
AU  - DeSimone,Jeff
AU  - Markowitz,Sara
TI  - The Effect of Child Access Prevention Laws on Non-Fatal Gun Injuries
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 11613
PY  - 2005
Y2  - September 2005
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11613
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11613.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Jeffrey S. DeSimone
Department of Economics
University of Texas at Arlington
701 S. West St.
Arlington, TX 76019
Tel: 817/272-3286
Fax: 817/272-3145
E-Mail: jdesimone@uta.edu

Sara Markowitz
Department of Economics
Emory University
1602 Fishburne Dr.
Atlanta, GA 30322
Tel: (404) 712-8167
E-Mail: sara.markowitz@emory.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2005-09-19
AB  - 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.
ER  -