People who are not shot
There were 17,927 firearm homicides in 2023 and about 85,000 non-fatal firearm assaults. Roughly two thirds of both happen in the 31 states where a private sale needs no check at all.
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Value
The stream is people who are alive, and people who are not in a hospital with a gunshot wound, at the end of the period. It sits just below the top of the scale because it mixes deaths with a larger number of serious injuries, weighted towards the deaths, which is how this site prices a stream containing both. A tenth is added on the same anchor for the families of those killed, following the same rule used wherever this site counts violent death. Nothing is added for fear, for the neighbourhoods where shootings concentrate, or for the medical spending avoided, each of which is real and each of which would enlarge this argument. Nothing is counted for the offenders. The value sits just below the maximum: the stream mixes deaths with a larger number of injuries, weighted towards the deaths.
Impact
American firearm homicides numbered 17,927 in 2023 and non-fatal firearm assaults about 85,000 [1][2]. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia already require checks on private sales, so the bill is new in 31 states holding roughly 65 percent of both figures: about 11,650 deaths and 55,000 injuries. The reduction used is four percent, in a range from one to twelve percent wherever the requirement bites at all; whether it bites at all is the separate question carried by the plausibility. That figure is set low deliberately: the research synthesis rates the evidence for private-sale checks as limited, and the larger effects in the literature come from permit-to-purchase laws, which add a licence and an in-person application that this bill does not [3]. Four percent gives 466 deaths and 2,210 serious injuries a year. Valued at the figures this site uses for a life and a serious injury, with a tenth added for the families of those killed, that is 983 million euro. The Impact is the largest here and it is a single assumed percentage away from being nothing at all.
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| Firearm homicides in the 31 states without a private-sale requirement [2] | 17,927 nationally, about 65 percent of them | 11,650 deaths a year | |
| × | Reduction once private sales need a check Setting, range 1 to 12 percent wherever the requirement bites at all: a quarter of what permit-to-purchase studies report, because the synthesis rates the evidence for private-sale checks alone as limited [3] | 4 % | 466 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 | 718 million euro a year |
| + | Serious injuries avoided, valued alongside them the value of a serious injury used across this site [1] | 55,000 firearm assaults, 4 percent fewer, at 120,000 euro each | 983 million euro a year |
| ÷ | Normalised Impact scale of this evaluation | 100 million euro a point | 9.83 |
Plausibility
The counterfactual is the same states without the requirement, which is what the state-panel studies behind the research synthesis construct from the timing of state laws. Those designs are quasi-experimental — differences in differences across states and years — and the synthesis grades the resulting evidence for comprehensive checks on total homicide as moderate, its second-highest category [3]. The confounder that matters is that states legislating background checks also legislate everything else at the same time, from permit requirements to waiting periods to storage laws, so the effect attributed to checks may belong to a package; the strongest individual results in the field, from Connecticut's permit law and Missouri's repeal of one, are results about permits and not about checks alone. That is named and unresolved, and it is the reason the effect size used here is a quarter of what those studies report. Reverse causation is present in the raw correlation, since states with more violence legislate more, and the panel designs address it with state fixed effects. The Plausibility is a little above the middle: the direction is supported by a graded synthesis and the specific policy in this bill is the weakest-evidenced version of it.
Counterfactual: the same states before their own law, and states that never passed one. Design: quasi-experimental — differences in differences across states and years, graded as moderate evidence for comprehensive checks on total homicide by the research synthesis [3]. Confounder: states legislating checks legislate other firearm measures at the same time, so the effect may belong to a package; named, unresolved, and the reason the effect size used is a quarter of what permit-law studies report. Direction: reverse causation is present in the raw correlation and handled by state fixed effects. Ceiling: set at 6.0, below the quasi-experimental ceiling, because the graded evidence covers comprehensive check regimes and not the private-sale requirement on its own.