Supporting Multicomponent Gun Control Laws: A Need for Valid and Comprehensive Research

In their article in this issue of AJPH (p. 1309), Karaye et al. assessed the impact of the New York Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement Act (NY SAFE Act) on firearm-related suicide and homicide rates for the 1999 to 2019 period.1 Introduced in January 2013, the NY SAFE Act contains many provisions going beyond the general federal requirements, such as increased background checks before the purchase of a firearm and ammunition, prohibition of large-capacity magazines and some semiautomatic weapons, a red flag system, and safe storage conditions. The authors' results indicated that the NY SAFE Act was associated with a significant decrease in firearmrelated homicides, whereas firearmrelated suicides were not affected. Furthermore, the authors did not observe any substitution effect. Their findings suggest that multicomponent gun control laws can prevent firearm-related homicides.Their article has two main contributions: (1) the method they used to estimate the impact of the act, which overcame several threats to internal validity usually found in evaluations of gun control laws, and (2) the implications for future studies and public health policy that emerge from their discussion. However, the authors seem to have struggled, for instance, to provide strong hypotheses to explain why the NY SAFE Act was associated with a significant drop in firearms-related homicides but not suicide rates. Here I elaborate on both contributions.