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.
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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 to twenty-three orders issued, and 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 conservative end, one in twenty-three, 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 348 deaths a year, or 536 million euro with the family surcharge. The Impact is the largest here and it is the product of two numbers, one of them measured and one of them a guess about how a reluctant state behaves.
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| 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 conservative end of the one-in-seventeen-to-twenty-three range measured across four state programmes [4] | 23 | 348 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 | 536 million euro a year |
| ÷ | Normalised Impact scale of this evaluation | 100 million euro a point | 5.36 |
Plausibility
The counterfactual is people with the same documented risk profile who were not subject to an order, which the study constructs by comparing observed deaths among respondents against the deaths expected in a matched population at equivalent risk. The design is quasi-experimental in construction and observational in nature: nobody randomised who received an order, and the matching is on recorded risk rather than on anything exogenous. The confounder that matters is that a person who comes to a court's attention is in a different state from a statistically matched peer — usually worse, which would make the true effect larger than measured, occasionally better, because someone whose family cares enough to petition has support that others lack. The authors address it by reporting the estimate separately for cases with documented suicidality, where the effect is stronger, which is the direction the mechanism predicts. Reverse causation does not arise: the order follows the risk. Substitution to another method is inside the estimate, since the comparison is of deaths rather than of firearm deaths. The Plausibility is above the middle: the ratio is measured across four programmes and thousands of cases, on a comparison that matches rather than randomises.
Counterfactual: a matched population at equivalent documented risk who were not subject to an order. Design: controlled — observed deaths among 4,583 respondents against expected deaths in a matched group, with no exogenous variation in who receives an order (Swanson and colleagues, 2024) [4]. Confounder: people who come to a court's attention differ from matched peers, usually towards higher risk, which would understate the effect, but occasionally towards more family support, which would overstate it; addressed by reporting the estimate separately for documented suicidality. Direction: reverse causation does not arise, the order follows the risk. Ceiling: controlled 7.0 binds below the multiple-precedents ceiling of 8.5.