America has around one mass shooting, defined as at least four people shot, per day on average. But for a few days in May this year, that gun injury rate is likely to drop.

A brief, partial respite from gun injuries is expected when some 80,000 gun owners descend on Dallas for the annual National Rifle Association convention. That’s because the convention has historically coincided with a temporary — and dramatic — drop in gun-related injuries, according to a new analysis published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

To come to that conclusion, researchers from Harvard Medical School and Columbia University used an insurance database of nearly 76 million claims to tally emergency department visits and hospitalizations related to firearm injuries on NRA convention dates, and during identical control days in the three weeks before and three weeks after the meeting, from 2007 through 2015.

They then estimated the rates of firearm injuries for both the NRA convention dates and the control dates, hoping to test common assumptions: that gun injuries often occur among inexperienced users, and that […]