The United States has a big problem with gun injuries: it suffers tens of thousands of gun related deaths and injuries annually; its gun related death and injury rates dwarf those in other developed nations. The United States also has a big problem with addressing gun deaths and injuries: there is wide public support for many policies aimed at reducing the toll, but little political will to undertake policy changes. Both problems have gotten a bit better in the past decade, but both remain quite serious indeed.

The premise behind Evaluating Gun Policy is that the second problem may diminish in the face of clear information on the effects of policies designed to reduce gun injuries. The editors—both eminent American economic scholars with a longstanding interest in violence and criminology—undertook to summarize current policies related to guns, and to present current assessments of the effectiveness of policies that have been put in place over the past decade or so.

The resulting book is a valuable review and reference, which should be on the shelf of everyone in the United States who works on gun injury reduction and related policy development. It is likely also to be informative for those working on reducing deaths and injuries from small arms and light weapons around …