" A study that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1991 examined the effects of the ban through 1987 and concluded that it saved 47 lives a year following its passage."
I'm sure that the 'study' didn't even look at the number of lives saved by the defensive use of a handgun or those that will now be lost if guns are banned.
That was the infamous Arthur Kellermann study.
"New England Journal of Medicine" should tell anyone enough to know what they were going to say they discovered.
That mag is merely high cost bird cage liner.
It is not the infamous Arthur Kellerman study, which was of Seattle, not Washington, D.C.
The Loftin study compared the number of murders in Washington, D.C. (which decreased), where the handgun ban was in force, to the surrounding counties in Maryland and Virginia (which increased), both before and after the D.C. handgun ban went into effect. Notice that I said "number of murders," not murder rates. The study ignored the fact that the population of D.C. declined during the study period, and the population of the surrounding counties increased during that same period. When murder rates in these areas were compared the ban shows no effect.
There are several other defects in the study as well, e.g., the study period ended just before the crack epidemic caused murder rates to soar in D.C., even though those data were available at the time the study was done.