What factors drive state firearm law adoption?

Each of the states in the U.S. has its own legislation about firearms. What are the factors that drive the adoption of specific laws in a state?

In their new paper, our own Prof. Maurizio Porfiri with Prof. James Macinko from University of California Los Angeles and his PhD student Duncan A. Clark try to answer this question. Through statistical arguments based on network theory, they discovered that adoption of permissive and restrictive laws on guns depends on the progressiveness and homicide rate of a state, and on whether neighboring states have adopted the same law.

Read the article published in Social Science & Medicine here.

Image credit: Duncan Clark, James Macinko, and Maurizio Porfiri. et al.