People who do not die
Firearm suicide is the largest category of American gun death and the one where the method decides the outcome: the same act with a different method is survived nine times out of ten. Removing the gun for a year removes the method during the crisis.
▸ Show reasoning & sources ▾ Hide reasoning & sources
Value
The stream is people alive at the end of the period who would otherwise have died by their own hand, with a tenth added on the same anchor for the families, as this site does wherever it counts violent death. It sits just below the top of the scale rather than at it, because a proportion of what these orders prevent is an attempt rather than a death and the estimate used is of deaths averted. What is priced is the life, not the crisis, and not the treatment that may follow the order. Nothing is counted for the people who are removed from danger and then relapse, whose outcome the estimate already reflects. The value sits just below the maximum: the stream is life, reached by taking the method away during the weeks the danger is highest.
Impact
Swanson and colleagues examined 4,583 removal cases across California, Connecticut, Maryland and Washington and estimated that one suicide is prevented for every seventeen orders issued, or every twenty-four under a more cautious assumption about how often a respondent would have used a firearm — and one for every thirteen to eighteen where the record documents suicidality [4]. That is a revision upward of the earlier and widely quoted figure of one in ten. The cautious end, one in twenty-four, is used here. How many orders a federal law would add is the softer number: the twenty-eight states without their own programme have chosen not to have one, and their courts and police would be starting from nothing. Eight thousand additional orders a year is used, in a range from three thousand to twenty thousand — well below the volume the existing state programmes now produce. That gives about 333 deaths a year, or 513 million euro with the family surcharge. The Impact is the largest here and it is the product of two numbers, one of them modelled from death records and one of them a guess about how a reluctant state behaves.
▸ Show calculation ▾ Hide calculation
| Additional removal orders a year in the states without a programme Setting, range 3,000 to 20,000: the twenty-eight states concerned have chosen not to legislate, and their courts and police would be starting from nothing [3] | eight thousand | 8,000 orders a year | |
| ÷ | Orders needed to prevent one suicide the cautious end of the study's estimate — one in seventeen on its main assumption, one in twenty-four on the more cautious one — modelled from linked death records across four state programmes [4] | 24 | 333 deaths a year |
| × | Value of a life, with a tenth added for the families the value of a statistical life used across this site and the surcharge this site applies to violent death | 1.4 million euro each, plus 10 percent | 513 million euro a year |
| ÷ | Normalised Impact scale of this evaluation | 100 million euro a point | 5.13 |
Plausibility
The counterfactual is not a group of people who were observed: the study links the 4,583 respondents to death records, counts the suicides that occurred among them by method, and then constructs what would have happened without the order from published case-fatality rates — it extrapolates how many attempts must lie behind the recorded deaths, and applies an assumption about how often those attempts would have used a firearm had one been available [4]. That is a modelled counterfactual on a mechanism, the lethality gap between firearms and other methods, and not a comparison against matched people who received no order; nobody was randomised, and nothing exogenous decides who is petitioned against. The confounder is that a person who comes to a court's attention differs from the average person at risk — usually towards higher danger, which would make the true effect larger than modelled, occasionally towards more family support, which would make it smaller — and the design cannot separate that from the effect. What holds the argument up is the direction: a county-level comparison of four states that passed removal laws with no other firearm legislation at the same time, against eight states that passed none, finds firearm suicide about 3.8 per 100,000 lower a year after passage, with no matching change in non-firearm suicide [6]. Reverse causation does not arise: the order follows the risk. Substitution to another method is inside the modelled ratio by construction, since the case-fatality rates are what it is built from. The Plausibility is at the upper end of what a modelled mechanism can carry: the ratio is built from thousands of linked death records on a well-measured lethality gap, its direction is confirmed at population level, and no design with a comparison group has yet measured it.
Counterfactual: modelled, not observed — deaths among 4,583 respondents linked to death records, with the no-order outcome constructed from published case-fatality rates by suicide method and an assumption about firearm use in the absence of the order (Swanson and colleagues, 2024) [4]. Design: mechanistic — the quantity rests on the lethality gap between methods, with no matched or exogenous comparison group; a county-level difference-in-differences across four states with no concurrent firearm laws confirms the direction, not the ratio [6]. Confounder: respondents differ from the average person at risk in both directions; unresolved by the design. Direction: reverse causation does not arise, the order follows the risk. Ceiling: mechanistic 6.0 binds, below the multiple-precedents ceiling of 8.5.