# Using Small-Area Estimates of Firearm Ownership to Investigate Violence Disparities and Firearm Policy Effects

> **NIH ALLCDC R01** · RAND CORPORATION · 2020 · $349,829

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT
 The social, economic and human costs of firearm violence, including nearly 40,000 deaths annually,
are unevenly distributed, with certain population subgroups disproportionately impacted by firearms homicides
and suicides. Despite the scale and scope of firearm violence, serious gaps in available data measuring
firearm ownership across population strata over time undermine our ability to evaluate drivers of these health
disparities or to evaluate firearm safety policies and interventions. As such, prior research examining changes
in violence exposure associated with gender or race, or evaluating the efficacy of gun safety policies, has
typically ignored large differences in firearm ownership rates across population strata, or has relied on weak
cross-sectional analyses with highly aggregated, state-level measures of firearm ownership. These procedures
render many analyses of differential firearms violence risk and of the causal effects of policies ambiguous.
 This project, which falls under Funding Option A, will use small-area estimation techniques to
generate informative estimates of household firearm ownership within strata defined by gender, race, marital
status, urbanicity, and state, over the period 1980-2020. These constructed measures will be used to
investigate the extent to which mortality disparities are associated with differences in rates of firearm
ownership, leveraging the longitudinal nature of our data to better describe dynamics over time between
firearm ownership and firearm mortality outcomes. Findings will inform how firearm ownership varies across
populations, communities, and time; and how this variation relates to differential firearm homicide and suicide
risk among subgroups. Better understanding these relationships is critical to the development and
implementation of effective gun safety interventions (Objective One). Finally, we will use our new measures of
firearm ownership to conduct innovative and more sensitive and precise evaluations of the effects of policies
designed to improve firearm safety. By allowing policy impacts to depend on the levels of firearm ownership
across a large number of population strata, our approach improves causal identification of policy effects for
those laws that target the safety behavior of gun owners, and it better captures both inter-state and sub-state
variability in mortality outcomes (Objective Two).
 This study thus addresses both objectives of RFA-CE-20-006 by providing novel and rigorous
evidence on demographic and geographic trends in firearm ownership, on potentially heterogeneous
relationships between changes in firearm ownership and changes in firearm deaths, and on the effectiveness
of gun safety policies.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10163374
- **Project number:** 1R01CE003279-01
- **Recipient organization:** RAND CORPORATION
- **Principal Investigator:** ANDREW R MORRAL
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** ALLCDC
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $349,829
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2020-09-30 → 2022-09-29

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10163374

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10163374, Using Small-Area Estimates of Firearm Ownership to Investigate Violence Disparities and Firearm Policy Effects (1R01CE003279-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10163374. Licensed CC0.

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