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Everytown Research & Policy

View the Data: State-Level Firearm-Safety Laws at the Turn of the 21st Century

By: Erica Jade Mullen, Ph.D., Courtney Zale, J.D., Megan J. O'Toole, Ph.D., Paige Tetens, Sonali Rajan, Ed.D., Sarah Burd-Sharps, M.A. 7.1.2026

      Introduction

      Gun violence is a persistent and devastating public health and safety crisis in the United States. Every year, more than 100,000 people are shot and killed or wounded. This reality demands urgent and creative evidence-informed solutions. One of the most critical facets of effective gun violence prevention involves passing and implementing state and federal gun safety laws. Over the past three decades, states in particular have taken action to enact—and roll back—certain gun laws. Given the constant flux and many permutations of these laws from one state to another, measuring their impact on different types of gun violence remains a difficult and time-consuming task, but a critical one. For all but the most seasoned legal experts, these changes are challenging to track, and consequently, many gun laws go unstudied. 

      Everytown’s Longitudinal State-Level Firearm Safety Law Database

      To help fill this gap, in June 2026, the Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund research and policy teams published “State-Level Firearm-Safety Laws at the Turn of the 21st Century,” a peer-reviewed article in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.1Erica Jade Mullen et al., “State-Level Firearm-Safety Laws at the Turn of the 21st Century,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 71, no. 4 (2026): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2026.108432. The article introduces and describes a novel database that contains information on 146 gun safety laws, measuring whether each law was present or absent in every state from 1999 through 2023. The result is a longitudinal law database, comprising 1,250 state-year binary observations. A unique asset of this database is its categorization using six key themes: (1) foundational laws; (2) firearm industry and product safety; (3) firearms in public places; (4) keeping firearms out of the wrong hands; (5) policing and civil rights; and (6) firearm sales and permitting laws.  Everytown’s team of field-specific legal experts, who have extensive experience in analyzing firearm safety laws in real time, sourced and interpreted this set of laws. Next, a team of policy researchers coded these laws from proposal to enactment. While we use the term “law” to refer to statutes, state agency policies, and executive orders, statutes make up the vast majority of the dataset.

      This work was inspired by Everytown’s Gun Law Rankings analysis, a tool that helps the public and policymakers determine how the laws in their state compare to the nation. Although this tool shows how laws affect violence in general, a longitudinal database allows users to draw more causal conclusions about policy impacts. Our hope is that this database will serve as a valuable resource for filling critical gaps in understanding how the presence, absence, enactment, and repeal of various gun safety laws—and combinations of laws—are associated with gun violence trends over time, geography, demographics, and intent. Ideally, in turn this will allow policymakers, researchers, community groups, and other key stakeholders to prioritize policy solutions shown to work.

      States With the Largest Changes in Firearm-Safety Laws

      State19992023Change,
      1999–2023
      Arkansas4223-19
      Mississippi2915-14
      Montana2210-12
      Alaska3321-12
      Georgia2514-11
      State19992023Change, 1999-2023
      Illinois4511267
      Colorado146349
      New Mexico64943
      Oregon 367135
      New York7110433

      Implications for Researchers and Policymakers

      Our intention is that the extensive information in this publication and database will empower academics, policymakers, and community members to have more granular and thoughtful insights into the firearm safety law landscape in the United States. Everytown’s Longitudinal State-Level Firearm Safety Law Database will allow researchers in particular to analyze data that was previously unavailable in pursuit of critical questions such as these: 

      1. How long has my state required live-fire training to get a concealed carry permit? 
      2. Do state-level high-capacity magazine bans have an impact on firearm homicide rates? 
      3. Does the presence of secure gun storage laws help prevent suicide in adults?
      4. Do states with Extreme Risk Protection Order laws have lower rates of domestic violence?

      The longitudinal database contains the legal information needed to answer these questions and much more—and can help generate the crucial knowledge needed to advocate for effective gun safety laws. Everytown Research uses this dataset to analyze questions like these, and encourages other researchers to employ this data in their own work. 

      Access the Database

      The database of laws can be downloaded below. The full article, with the accompanying tables, figures, and methodology, is available through the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. For more information about this study and its content or to explore opportunities to partner with us in using this data, please contact [email protected]. 

      Everytown Longitudinal State-Level Firearm Safety Law Database 6.30.26Download

      Acknowledgments

      Everytown Research is deeply grateful to those who contributed their time, expertise, and thoughtful review throughout the development of this resource:

      Jonas Oransky, Senior Legal Director 

      Ashley D. Cannon, Managing Research Editor

      Aparna Lakkaraju, former Research Intern

      Authors

      • Erica Jade Mullen, Ph.D.

        Dr. Erica Jade Mullen is a Research Consultant for Everytown for Gun Safety. Before this she was a Senior Research Scientist with the New York City Department of Social Services, in its Office of Evaluation and Research. She obtained a doctorate in sociology in 2014 from Brown University. Before graduate school, she worked for a marketing research firm in Washington, D.C. focused on the financial services and health care industries. She also spent a semester working full-time in Senator Ted Kennedy’s Boston office with his immigration specialist, helping Massachusetts constituents resolve immigration-related matters.

      • Courtney Zale, J.D.

        Courtney Zale is the Director of Policy Development at Everytown for Gun Safety. With more than a decade of experience in gun violence prevention, she specializes in developing innovative policy frameworks, analyzing state-level laws and proposed legislation across all 50 states, and executing impactful federal and state legislative campaigns. Prior to joining Everytown, Zale worked as a corporate lawyer at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP.

      • Megan J. O’Toole, Ph.D.

        Megan J. O’Toole, PhD, is Director of Research at Everytown for Gun Safety. Her work focuses on preventing gun violence in cities primarily through collaborative and community-led strategies. She also serves as Research Chair at Fund for a Safer Future, where she leads a committee of subject matter experts in stewarding annual research grants. Prior to joining Everytown, she worked at the Vera Institute of Justice and John Jay’s Research and Evaluation Center. She holds a doctorate in psychology and law from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where she also serves as an adjunct professor.

      • Paige Tetens

        Paige Tetens is a Senior Research Associate at Everytown for Gun Safety. Since 2018, she has dedicated her career to studying the causes of and solutions to gun violence, producing research that informs policy and strategy. Paige has conducted original research on topics including veteran firearm suicide, misogynist extremist violence, mass shootings, and Stand Your Ground laws. She oversees the organization’s real-time gun violence databases of gunfire on school grounds and unintentional shootings by children, leading data validation and historical data collection.

      • Sonali Rajan, Ed.D.

        Dr. Sonali Rajan is the Senior Director of Research at Everytown for Gun Safety. Dr. Rajan’s expertise is as a school violence prevention researcher; she has studied gun violence, school safety, and adverse childhood experiences for nearly 15 years. Her work is specifically focused on how to best create healthy and safe environments where children can optimally learn and develop.

      • Sarah Burd-Sharps, M.A.

        Sarah was Senior Director of Research at Everytown from 2019 to 2025. She previously co-directed Measure of America at the Social Science Research Council, where she developed a human development index for the United States and pioneered work on youth disconnection. At Everytown, she co-authored five peer-reviewed journal articles and countless reports and appeared regularly in the media to help shape the conversation about our gun violence epidemic.

      The Latest

      New Data, Same Conclusion: Smart Gun Laws Save Lives

      Smart gun laws save lives. That’s the fundamental thesis driving our work at Everytown for Gun Safety, and we pursued it with great success in 2023. Last year, state lawmakers passed a record-breaking 130 gun safety policies, while also blocking 95 percent of the gun lobby’s legislative agenda. But provisional numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that gun violence hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels. This raises a pointed question: Does our work actually work? The answer is yes. Today, Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund released its 2024 state Gun Law Rankings, which once again show a clear correlation between states with strong gun laws and lower rates of gun violence. Here are three key takeaways:

      Research Explained

      Did you know?

      Every day, nearly 130 people in the United States are killed with guns, twice as many are shot and wounded, and countless others are impacted by acts of gun violence.

      Everytown Research analysis of CDC, WONDER, Provisional Mortality Statistics, Multiple Cause of Death, 2020–2024; Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project nonfatal firearm injury data, 2020; and SurveyUSA, Market Research Study #26602, 2022.

      Last updated: 1.15.2026