Fairly long overview by FactCheck.org (5/10/19):
O’Rourke improper on Gun Control Stat
QuoteAfter the Colorado school shooting,Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke advocated universal background checks for gun purchases, claiming that state laws mandating universal checks “have been shown to reduce gun violence by 50 percent.”
But academic research doesn’t support that.
O’Rourke’s campaign said the statistic came from Everytown for Gun Safety, or but the gun-control group told us it has updated its background fabric on the issue in light of “rigorous” new research that has “improved our understanding of this.” ...
A study led by Boston University Community Health Sciences Professor Michael Siegel and published in March in the Journal of General Internal Medicine looked at homicide and suicide rates in all 50 states over a 26-year period and analyzed the relationship between various firearm laws,including universal background checks. The research found that universal background checks are associated with approximately a 15 percent reduction in firearm homicide. ...
Siegel, who has extensively studied gun violence, and famous that his research found an “organization” between universal background checks and reduced homicide rates,“but did not definitively conclude causality.”
“I think that we are not quite at the level of research when we can conclude there is a causal relationship, but we’re probably close, and ” he said. ...
Siegel said states that have lower firearm violence rates to inaugurate with are the ones that tend to pass laws requiring universal background checks. He and the other researchers who participated in the study “tried to account for that by looking at CHANGES in homicide rates over time from before to after these laws,while comparing the changes with those in other states during the same time period,” he said. ...
Source: thesurvivalpodcast.com