In this article, we discuss the candidacy of one of the more surprising numbers to surface in the course of America’s gun debate: that 2.5 million Americans use a gun defensively against a criminal attacker each year [Kleek and Gertz, 1995]. News items, editorial writers, even Congressional Research Service [Bea, 1994] have mention the 2.5 million defensive gun uses (DGU’s) as established fact. This number is considerably higher than our best estimate of the number of crimes committed each year with a firearm (1.3 million)[U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1996]. and has been used as an argument against regulations that would restrict widespread firearms ownership. The implicit notion seems to be that if there are more legitimate uses than criminal uses of guns against people, then widespread gun ownership is a net plus for public safety.
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The Great American Gun War: Notes from Four Decades in the Trenches
In this essay I provide an account of how research on gun violence has evolved over the last four decades, intertwined with personal observations and commentary on my contributions. It begins with a sketch of the twentieth century history of gun control in the United States. I then provide an account of why gun violence is worth studying, with a discussion of how and why the type of weapon used in crime matters, and assess the social costs of the widespread private ownership of firearms. I then detour into the methodological disputes over estimating basic facts relevant to understanding gun use and misuse. In Section IV, I focus on how gun availability influences the use of guns in crime and whether the incidence of misuse is influenced by the prevalence of gun ownership, regulations, and law enforcement. I go on to review evaluations of efforts to focus law enforcement directly at gun use in violent crime. Next I turn to the hottest topic of our day, the role of guns in self-defense and what might be deemed private deterrence. The conclusion summarizes the claims and counterclaims concerning gun regulation and asks, finally, if there is the possibility of an influential role for scientific research in the policy debate.
Regulating Gun Markets
With the rapid increase since the mid-1980’s in rates of homicide and other criminal violence, crime has emerged as the nation’s leading domestic problem. One tactic for mitigating lethal violence is gun control –government regulation of the production, exchange, and use of personal firearms. A number of proposals are currently being debated at the federal, state, and local levels. Recently, Congress enacted the Brady Bill and adopted a partial ban on assault weapons, while the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) toughened sales procedures for gun-dealers. A central issue in debating these and other control measures is which types of regulation are likely to be most cost-effective in reducing gun violence.
This Article concerns the secondary gun market, one of the key issues in understanding the potential effectiveness of gun control measures. The primary objective of much of the gun control effort in the United States is to discourage certain categories of people, including felons and those under indictment, from obtaining and possessing guns, while preserving ready availability of guns for everyone else.
The Influence of Gun Availability on Violent Crime Patterns
The spectacular increases in violent crime that began in the mid-1960s continue, and Americans are currently being murdered, robbed, and raped at historically unprecedented rates. Firearms are used in a minority of violent crimes but are of special concern because more than 60 percent of the most serious crimes-criminal homicides-are committed with firearms. This essay presents a variety of evidence to the effect that the widespread availability of firearms contributes to the criminal homicide rate and influences violent crime patterns in several other respects as well. A gun is usually superior to other weapons readily available for use in violent crime; even in the hands of a weak and unskilled assailant, a gun poses a credible threat and can be used to kill quickly, from a distance, and in a relatively “impersonal” fashion. Guns are particularly valuable against relatively invulnerable targets. Hence, gun availability facilitates robbery of commercial places and lethal assaults on people who would ordinarily be able to defend themselves against other weapons. Some of the patterns of gun use in violent crime can be readily interpreted in terms of relative vulnerability of different types of victims. Guns are also more dangerous than other weapons, in the sense that victims of robbery and assault are more likely to be killed if the assailant uses a gun. On the other hand, the victim is less likely to be injured in a gun robbery than in other robberies, since the gun robber usually does not feel the need to employ physical force. This analysis suggests a number of predictions concerning the effects of gun availability on the number, distribution, and seriousness of violent crimes. In principle, these predictions could be tested directly by observing the effects of changes in gun availability on statistical characterizations of violent crime patterns. Not much research of this sort has been done, in part because it is difficult to find a suitable measure for gun availability. Future research should be directed toward remedying this problem. In the meantime, it seems fair to conclude from the available evidence that the type of weapon is not an incidental aspect of violent crime, but rather has a substantial influence on the nature of the encounter and its likely consequences.
Underground Gun Markets
This article provides an economic analysis of underground gun markets, drawing on interviews with gang members, gun dealers, professional thieves, prostitutes, police, public school security guards and teenagers in the city of Chicago, complemented by results from government surveys of recent arrestees in 22 cities, plus administrative data for suicides, homicides, robberies, arrests and confiscated crime guns. We find evidence that transactions costs are considerable in the underground gun market in Chicago, and to some extent in other cities as well. The most likely explanation is that the underground gun market is both illegal and ‘thin’– relevant information about trading opportunities is scarce due to illegality, which makes search costly for market participants and leads to a market thickness effect on transaction costs.
Gun Markets
The systematic study of how available weapons influence the rates, patterns, and outcomes of criminal violence is new, but it is now a well-established and fast-growing subfield in criminology, legal studies, public health, and economics. This review focuses on the transactions that arm dangerous offenders, noting that if those transactions could be effectively curtailed it would have an immediate and profound effect on gun violence and homicide rates. Guns are legal commodities, but violent offenders typically obtain their guns by illegal means. Our knowledge of these transactions comes primarily from trace data on guns recovered by the police and from occasional surveys of gun-involved offenders. Because most guns used in crime are sourced from the stock of guns in private hands (rather than a purchase from a licensed dealer), the local prevalence of gun ownership appears to influence the transaction costs and the proportions of robberies and assaults committed with guns rather than knives or other weapons. Nonetheless, regulations that govern licensed dealers have been linked to trafficking patterns and in some cases to the use of guns in crime.
Investigating the Link Between Gun Possession and Gun Assault
Among a long list of issues facing the American public, guns are third only to gay marriage and abortion in terms of people who report that they are ‘‘not willing to listen to the other side.’’
In concert with this cultural rift, scholarly discussion over guns has been similarly contentious. Although scholars and the public agree that the roughly 100000 shootings each year in the United States are a clear threat to health, uncertainty remains as to whether civilians armed with guns are, on average, protecting or endangering themselves from such shootings. Several case–control studies have explored the relationship between homicide and having a gun in the home, purchasing a gun, or owning a gun. These prior studies were not designed to determine the risk or protection that possession of a gun might create for an individual at the time of a shooting and have only considered fatal outcomes. This led a recent National Research Council committee to conclude that, although the observed associations in these case–control studies may be of interest, they do little to reveal the impact of guns on homicide or the utility of guns for self-defense. However, the recent National Research Council committee also concluded that additional individual-level studies of the association between gun ownership and violence were the
most important priority for the future. With this in mind, we conducted a population-based
case–control study in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to investigate the relationship between being
injured with a gun in an assault and an individual’s possession of a gun at the time. We included
both fatal and nonfatal outcomes and accounted for a variety of individual and situational confounders also measured at the time of assault.
Measuring the Market for Legal Firearms
The Massachusetts Firearms Records Bureau recently published administrative data covering the universe of legal firearm transactions in the state. We use these data to validate state-level background checks as a proxy for firearm transactions and show that historical trends in transactions within Massachusetts align with the rest of the United States. Using auxiliary data from a national survey, we show that the Massachusetts dataset can detect patterns in the demographics of both gun ownership and type of firearm purchased. Our analysis suggests that this dataset is a promising source of information for studying interactions in the market for legal firearms.
In Search of Common Ground: Expert Judgments on Gun Policy Effects
As our review of the existing literature demonstrated, there is very little scientific evidence available to support the decisions that policymakers and the public must make about whether to implement or change various gun policies. Without strong scientific evidence, policymakers and the public rely heavily on what advocates or social scientists believe the effects of policies are most likely to be. The opinions of these gun policy experts are an important influence on gun policy debates and decisions because people believe that the experts have an especially well-informed understanding of the gun polices under consideration, how similar laws have performed historically, and how specific policies would affect particular stakeholder groups.
Different communities of gun policy experts have sharply divided views on many gun policies, as often becomes clear in the debates that occur when states and the federal government consider new gun legislation. Less clear is whether there are laws or policies for which such differences are less stark, or whether there may be a combination of policies that experts of every stripe could regard as an improvement over existing policies. Finally, it has not been clear whether experts disagree about which objectives gun policies should be trying to achieve or whether experts agree on the objectives but disagree on which policies are most likely to achieve those objectives. If the experts chiefly disagree on the latter, this suggests a role for new and better scientific study of the true effects of gun policies.
To begin to answer these questions, RAND researchers surveyed 173 gun policy experts (across two fieldings in 2016 and 2020) on what they believed the effects of the following 19 gun policies would be on ten different outcomes.
Handgun Waiting Periods Reduce Gun Deaths
Handgun waiting periods are laws that impose a delay between the initiation of a purchase and final acquisition of a firearm. We show that waiting periods, which create a “cooling off” period among buyers, significantly reduce the incidence of gun violence. We estimate the impact of waiting periods on gun deaths, exploiting all changes to state-level policies in the Unites States since 1970. We find that waiting periods reduce gun homicides by roughly 17%. We provide further support for the causal impact of waiting periods on homicides by exploiting a natural experiment resulting from a federal law in 1994 that imposed a temporary waiting period on a subset of states.