In recent decades, studies have investigated the efficacy of certain gun policies in reducing violent crime and preventing high-risk individuals, such as those issued with domestic violence restraining orders or stricken with serious mental illnesses, from gaining access to firearms.
To discern common findings among these studies, researchers Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research at Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Dr. Garen Wintemute, the director of the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) Violence Prevention Research Program, reviewed and critiqued studies published between 1999 and August 2014 that sought to address the effects of gun policies in the United States.
Recently published in the 2015 Annual Review of Public Health, the study delineates the conclusions as well as the limitations of earlier inquiries that investigated the effects of prohibitory measures.
Many people believe that the availability of guns in the United States is a leading cause of the nation’s high homicide rate. Lethal shootings in recent years, such as in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School, have forced the reevaluation of gun laws and have revitalized the debate for the necessity of more stringent regulations.
Existing federal gun policies in the U.S. have curtailed the ability of some people to legally purchase guns from federally licensed firearm dealers, and most states have chosen to implement additional disqualifying conditions not already contained in federal law.
A recurring question among the many studies evaluated by Webster and Wintemute is whether these additional measures have achieved their intended effect. Estimating the effectiveness of gun policies is difficult because it is often complicated to determine whether the offender purchased a firearm after the regulations had been imposed.
One study that circumvented this difficulty was conducted by Wintemute and his research team with the goal of assessing the effects of a 1991 California law. The regulation additionally prohibited people convicted of misdemeanor crimes of violence from legally purchasing handguns. The study compared the criminal offenses of two groups, one of which had purchased handguns despite misdemeanor charges before the law went into the effect been denied the purchase due to the law. The latter group was discovered to be 29 percent less likely to be arrested for violent crimes in the three years following the hindered firearms purchase.
The enforcement of more stringent laws appears to be a logical solution in preventing criminals from legally obtaining firearms, thereby decreasing gun violence. Whether they would actually be sufficient to deter the illegal transfer of firearms is, however, debatable. According to a nationwide survey conducted in 2004 of prison inmates convicted of crimes involving firearms, almost eight out of 10 reported that they had acquired guns from friends and family members or from the underground market.
Still, Webster and Wintemute insist that studies under their evaluation have shown that certain regulations, such as comprehensive background checks, mandatory reporting of lost or stolen firearms and rigorous permit-to-purchase laws, are associated with an overall decreased diversion of firearms to criminals.
Even though the varying rigidity of gun laws has led to the illegal import of guns from states with weaker gun laws to those with stronger regulations, the study found that the availability of guns is still limited in states with strong gun sales policies. Webster and Wintemute cite an in-depth investigation of Chicago’s underground gun market as evidence of the effect of market regulation on the accessibility of firearms. Investigators Philip J. Cook, Jens Ludwig, Sudhir Venkatesh and Anthony A. Braga conducted interviews with hundreds of individuals associated with the underground firearm economy. During this process, they discovered that the stringent laws had caused the prices of low-quality handguns to cost twice as much in Illinois than in other states with more lax regulations.
To promote nationwide safety, Webster and Wintemute stress the need for the expansion of federal gun policies to prevent criminals from obtaining firearms. They also emphasize the necessity of more rigorous research to systematically assess how the effects of some gun policies affect other policies.
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