Publication date: November 2024
Source: Journal of Public Economics, Volume 239
Author(s): Sanna Bergvall
Publication date: November 2024
Source: Journal of Public Economics, Volume 239
Author(s): Sanna Bergvall
Firearm purchasing records offer a potentially important administrative data source to identify individuals at elevated risk of perpetrating firearm violence. In this study, we describe individual, firearm, an…
U.S. firearm sales surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, with many purchases by first-time firearm owners. The 2023 National Survey of Gun Policy sought to understand the public health implications of this surg…
Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs) are civil court orders that prohibit firearm purchase and possession when someone is behaving dangerously and is at risk of harming themselves and/or others. As of June 2…
In recent years, there has been a growing number of thefts of firearms stored in vehicles. Despite this trend, there is limited research on firearm storage patterns in vehicles in the United States. This study…
Gun violence is a leading cause of death in the United States, where over 36,000 people were killed by gunshot in 2015 [including homicide, suicide, and accident (1)]. The gun-murder rate is 25 times as high in the United States as in other high-income nations, and the gun-suicide rate is eight times as high (2). Interpersonal gun violence has deleterious effects on economic development and standard of living in heavily impacted neighborhoods (3). Given this heavy burden, it is greatly concerning that many aspects of the body of research on gun violence have been deemed inadequate and inconclusive by expert panels of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (4–6). Fortunately, the flow of high-quality research has increased in recent years. Although the CDC largely withdrew from funding research on gun violence more than 20 years ago (under intense congressional pressure), there are active research programs in medicine, public health, law, and the social sciences under way in universities and think tanks. This good news, often lost in the well-justified complaints about the lack of federal funding, deserves greater recognition. New findings are providing a sound evidence base for policy-making and, among other contributions, have helped demonstrate efficacy in three important domains of gun policy: add-on sentences for gun use in violent crime, bans on gun possession by those convicted of domestic violence, and restrictions on carrying concealed firearms in public.
In 1999, more than 150,000 firearms were submitted by law enforcement agencies for tracing by the ATF, three times as many as in 1993. This growth in trace requests indicates the successes of ATF’s program in persuading state and local agencies of the strategic value of comprehensive firearms tracing. About four dozen cities now submit all firearms confiscated by the police for tracing, and the growing database of trace results has provided the raw material for improved intelligence on the channels by which guns are acquired by criminals. However, the proper interpretation and use of these data remains controversial.
This paper 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 teens 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 of considerable friction in the underground market for guns in Chicago. We argue that these frictions are due primarily to the fact that the underground gun market is both illegal and “thin” — the number of buyers, sellers, and total transactions is small, and relevant information is scarce. Gangs can help overcome these market frictions, but the gang’s economic interests cause gang leaders to limit supply primarily to gang members, and even then, transactions are usually loans or rentals with strings attached.
In this Article, the authors seek to help guide law enforcement activities targeting gun acquisition by high-risk people by examining two potentially important sources of crime guns: licensed retail dealers and traffickers. Limited data availability is a key reason more is not currently known about how criminals obtain guns. This article assembles a unique dataset that combines five years of crime gun trace requests submitted to the Bureau of Alcohol of Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives (ATF) National Tracing Center (NTC) by the Chicago Police Department (CPD), linked to other CPD data sources about the person who was caught with the gun. From these data, we are able to identify which of the violators have been gang members and to compare their guns with those of violators who are not gang members. We focus, in particular, on how gang members obtain guns since this population is at the highest risk of shooting someone and being shot. We hypothesize that gang members may differ from others in how they access guns.