In 2008, the Supreme Court’s five conservatives rewrote the Second Amendment to say what Republican politicians wished it had said all along. In the years that followed, 7,398 more children than expected died as a result of gun violence, according to a new study.

In his majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, Justice Antonin Scalia declared for the first time that the Constitution guarantees an “individual right to possess and carry” firearms, effectively striking down a de facto handgun ban in Washington, D.C. Scalia disposed of the inconvenient language at the beginning of the Second Amendment, which defines the right to “keep and bear Arms” in the context of service in a “well regulated Militia,” by dismissing it as a “prefatory clause” that is, for all intents and purposes, legally irrelevant.

Then, in 2010, the Court held that Scalia’s version of the Second Amendment constrains the authority of states, too, to limit gun ownership. (Because Heller was about a law in Washington, D.C., that decision technically applied only to the federal government.) In his majority opinion in McDonald v. Chicago, Justice Samuel Alito explained that the right to have a gun is “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition,” invoking the same language that he and his colleagues would use to get rid of the right to abortion care 12 years later.

In response to McDonald, Republican lawmakers began passing new and more permissive gun laws, seeking to empower their constituents to arm themselves as freely as Scalia and Alito imagined the founders would have wanted. Now, a team of researchers at Harvard, Yale, Brown, the University of Pittsburgh, and UCSF has an estimate on the real-world impact of the Court’s decision: Between 2010 and 2023, in states that enacted the “most permissive” gun laws, there were 6,029 more pediatric firearms deaths than expected, including 3,399 deaths by suicide. In states with “permissive” gun laws, 1,424 more children than expected died by gunfire. In both types of states, the excess firearm mortality rate was higher among Black children than among children of any other racial or ethnic group.