“There’s some evidence that certain types of gun laws, like universal background checks, may be useful,” David Hemenway, a Harvard University professor who has written extensively about injury prevention and guns, told me. “There’s no evidence at all about raising the age to 21. There’s certainly no evidence about arming teachers. There’s evidence [that] arming more people is typically good for the gun industry and bad for society.”
What we do know is that fewer guns likely lead to fewer deaths, as Vox’s German Lopez has explained at length. So improved background checks and higher age limits could reasonably be expected to help. But these are largely inferences from other countries with stronger gun laws rather than rigorously researched theories that have been tested in America. (We do have a few non-government studies, from Connecticut and Missouri, that suggest background checks help reduce gun deaths.) [...]
We don’t know much beyond that. Congress has made it effectively impossible for federally funded researchers to study gun violence. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health are the gold standards for public health research in the United States. But they are effectively barred from studying a problem that kills more than 35,000 people in a year.
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