Study: Universal Background Checks in California Did Not Reduce Homicides

A UC Davis study examining the first ten years after California adopted universal background checks shows that those checks did not reduce homicides.

In other words, the very checks that the Democrat Party pushes on the national level — the checks that Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) describes as the gun control “north star” — already exist in California, and they did nothing to reduce homicides during the time frame studied.

Townhall reported that the study was conducted by UC Davis’s Violence Prevention Research Program (VPRP) and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The study “found no net difference between firearm-related homicide rates before and during the 10 years after policy implementation.” Researchers admitted that the findings of their study “disagree with those of studies associating comprehensive background check policies with a reduction in firearm homicide and suicide in Connecticut, and an increase in firearm homicide and suicide after comprehensive background check repeal in Missouri.”

The study also looked at the impact of “misdemeanor violence prohibition policies,” which were put in place in 1991. They found firearm suicides to be “10.9 percent lower than expected” ten years later, but this was balanced out by the fact that non-firearm-related suicides fell by a similar percent. This would indicate something other firearms as the driving force behind the suicides.

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets with AWR Hawkins, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.