That is the title of a paper by Arnold and Priestley (2025). They examine whether gun purchase wait periods impact suicide rates using both variation in gun laws by state over time as well as variation in a county’s distance to the nearest state without a waiting period. First, some background on US gun purchase waiting periods in recent decades:
1981: Failed assassination attempt of US President Ronald Reagan leaves his press secretary, James Brady, permanently disabled1992: 23 states and DC (24 total) have waiting periods1993: Brady Act passes imposing a 5–day waiting period for handgun purchases. This impacts 21 stages, a 6 states received exemptions from the law.1998: Brady-imposed waiting period was eliminated with the passage of the NICS Improvement Amendments Act, which established the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), enabling instant background checks on firearm purchasers. 19 states repealed their waiting periods.2019: Only 17 states still have gun purchase waiting periods
The authors use 1991-2019 data from the State Firearm Database (Siegel 2020). Suicide rates at the county level come from county-level mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control. The authors examine each county’s proximity to the nearest county without a waiting period to see how suicide rates changed based on changing gun laws over time.
Using this approach, the authors find that:
…enacting waiting periods has a significant, negative effect, 5% [on suicide rates]. Counties close to a non-waiting-period state (within 50 miles) are unaffected by their own state’s waiting-period laws, as reflected in suicide rates, with no statistically significant change in response to such laws.
A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that we would have expected to see roughly 870 fewer firearm-related suicides in 2019 had non-waiting-period states enacted waiting periods.
This 870 estimate is from approximately 740 fewer suicides from non-waiting-period states adopting waiting periods and 130 fewer suicides from individuals within 50 miles of a non-waiting-period state now being more than 50 miles away
You can read the full paper here.
