The Nation - News from Nov. 9, 1988

Providing strong new evidence that gun control laws can reduce the homicide rate, a first-of-its-kind study has found people living in a city with strict firearm regulations have a sharply reduced risk of being murdered. The study found that while Seattle and Vancouver, Canada, had similar populations and crime rates, Seattle residents had 63% greater risk of being murdered and five times the risk of being killed with a handgun. Vancouver has strict gun control laws; Seattle does not. “We conclude that restricting access to handguns may reduce the rate of homicide in a community,” Dr. John Henry Sloan and his colleagues at Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine. The effectiveness of gun control has been studied before, but the new study is the first to try to separate effects of handgun control from differences among populations, the researchers said.