Researching Gun Policy: Futile or Feasible?

Every important area of public policy generates some degree of controversy and political manipulation, both of which can have the effect of distorting or impeding reliable research and fact-based analysis. One can argue that this is both inevitable and, arguably, not necessarily a bad thing. Gun policy research, however, is a subject where controversy and political meddling function as if on steroids.

In light of these controversies, the need for continued research on gun violence and policy is very great, as is the imperative for researchers to bring into gun policy analysis their disciplines’ theoretical perspectives. It is indeed a subject where multidisciplinarity is especially welcome. My own research on guns has been framed by policy theory, which helped unlock the conundrum of this issue’s particularly contentious and tumultuous nature within the larger realm of policymaking. This leads us to two key questions: What do we know now about the consequences of guns in America, and what of future research strategies?

What do we know?

Let us take as a starting point these oft-repeated propositions about guns: the United States has 20,000 gun laws; gun laws are mostly ineffective; Americans own too many guns to make gun regulation practical or even possible; gun laws violate citizens’ Second Amendment right to bear arms; gun laws contradict the American tradition of mostly unregulated gun ownership.

As it happens, none of these commonly repeated assertions is true. The figure of 20,000 gun laws has been unquestioningly repeated for decades. Yet no one has ever identified any empirical basis for the claim, which was apparently first uttered by a progun rights member of Congress during a congressional hearing in 1965. An exhaustive survey of gun laws in the early 2000s concluded that there were in fact about 400 gun laws in America.1Philip J. Cook and Kristin A. Goss, The Gun Debate (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 97. Complaints about the ineffectiveness of existing gun laws are common from both regulation proponents and gun rights advocates. Both have a point, except history has shown that gun laws are indeed effective—if legislation is written appropriately and enforcement is meaningful.

Case in point: the nation’s first modern national gun law, the National Firearms Act of 1934. It sought to sharply restrict the circulation of weapons used by gangsters, including fully automatic weapons like the Tommy Gun and sawed-off shotguns. The law worked: the use of fully automatic weapons in crime is virtually unheard-of, and the government keeps track of those few legally owned by civilians.

Even the simple question of how many guns Americans own—300 million is often mentioned— is subject to widely varying estimates. A 2015 survey concluded that civilians owned about 265 million guns.2Deborah Azrael et al., “The Stock and Flow of US Firearms: Results from the 2015 National Firearms Survey,” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 3, no. 5 (2017): 38–57. Yet a 2018 report by the Small Arms Survey, which examines gun trends around the globe, concluded that Americans actually owned 393 million guns—an even more staggering number.3Aaron Karp, Estimating Global Civilian-Held Firearms Numbers (Geneva: Small Arms Survey, June 2018). This presents us with two possibilities: that in three years Americans acquired an additional 128 million guns (a manufacturing near-impossibility), or that one or both of these estimates is wrong. The larger problem is that there is no comprehensive and accurate way to count guns today—a fact that is richly ironic as a matter of history, since the US government from colonial times through the Federal period used to routinely conduct gun censuses.

As to the question of accuracy, the most reliable estimate is probably below 300 million guns.4Cook and Goss, The Gun Debate, 3–4. In the light of these estimates, there is ample reason to believe that even limited restrictions can and do have beneficial effects to stem gun violence. This is partly because the subset of guns tied to violence is overwhelmingly handguns in a nation that owns twice as many long guns, and because guns linked to crime make up a small subset of all guns.

As for the Second Amendment, an examination of the 2008 Supreme Court case that established a personal right of citizens to own handguns for self-protection in the home, DC v. Heller, made clear that most existing gun regulations would pass constitutional muster, as indeed they have. Out of over a thousand court challenges to gun laws in the last decade, the overwhelming majority have been found constitutional.5“Second Amendment Basics,” Giffords Law Center.

Finally, the assumption that gun regulations arose in the twentieth century is completely false. Gun ownership is as old as the country, and so are gun laws. From colonial times up to the twentieth century, the colonies, states, and localities enacted literally thousands of gun laws of every imaginable variety. In fact, in many respects, guns were more heavily regulated in the nation’s first 300 years than in the last 30.6→Robert J. Spitzer, Guns across America: Reconciling Gun Rules and Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), chap. 2.
→Robert J. Spitzer, “Gun Law History in the United States and Second Amendment Rights,” Law and Contemporary Problems 80 (2017): 55–84. These laws are available and searchable in a database maintained by the Duke University Law School.

Research findings and policy

Bearing in mind the importance of establishing what we do or should already know about guns, violence, and policy, two questions present themselves: Are there laws or strategies that are likely to be effective in stemming gun violence, and what future research strategies should be pursued?

Something as simple as more effective gun storage practices could have significant safety benefits. A Washington Post report on school shootings from 1999 to 2018 found that of 105 instances when the source of the weapons used was identified, 80 percent of them came from the shooter’s home or that of a close relative or friend. If the guns used had been properly locked away, the instrument of destruction could have been eliminated. (One recent survey found that 54 percent of gun owners reported not storing their guns safely at home.7Cassandra K. Crifasi et al., “Storage Practices of US Gun Owners in 2016,” American Journal of Public Health 108, no. 4 (April 1, 2018): 532–537. This study was from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.) This simple remedy could be addressed at least two ways: by laws that penalize gun owners if their firearms are accessible to children (eight states have such laws) or if the weapon is used to commit a crime (seven states have these laws). A second approach would be to launch a sustained public service campaign to urge gun owners to store guns responsibly. Better safe storage practices would have positive effects in reducing gun suicides, thefts, and accidents.

A study of state and federal background checks for gun purchases found that checks are correlated with lower gun murder rates. The more thorough the check, the more effective it is in keeping guns from those who should not have them.8Ann Daniels, “The Online Gun Marketplace and the Dangerous Loophole in the National Instant Background Check System,” John Marshall Journal of Information Technology and Privacy Law 30, no. 4 (Summer 2014): 757–93. This is especially significant since a recent study found that about 22 percent of gun purchases and exchanges in the United States occur without any background check.9Matthew Miller, Lisa Hepburn, and Deborah Azrael, “Firearm Acquisition Without Background Checks: Results of a National Survey,” Annals of Internal Medicine 166, no. 4 (2017): 233–239. A study from the early 1990s pegged the number of non-background check gun acquisitions at 40 percent. Such non-check purchases can occur between private individuals or through the internet. This gap is often referred to as the “gun show loophole,” as non-check sales often occur at shows in many states.

Additionally, waiting periods that delay the purchase of handguns were found to reduce homicides by 17 percent. A 2017 study examined state waiting period policies since 1970, and also the five-day waiting period enacted in the 1993 Brady Law. (In 1998, the waiting period provision was phased out and replaced with a national instant background check system, creating the opportunity for a natural experiment.)10Michael Luca, Deepak Malhotra, and Christopher Poliquin, “Handgun Waiting Periods Reduce Gun Deaths,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (October 16, 2017).

Liberalized concealed carry laws that make it easy for citizens to carry firearms with them are associated with higher crime rates. At the start of the 1980s, 19 states did not permit civilians to carry concealed firearms; 29 states had “may issue” laws, meaning that citizens could apply for a concealed carry permit, but such applications were granted at the discretion of the state; only two states had “shall issue” laws, meaning that the states had to issue permits unless the applicant did not qualify to own a gun; one state (Vermont) had no permitting whatsoever. As of 2017, 29 states had shall issue laws; nine states plus the District of Columbia retained may issue laws; and 12 states had eliminated permitting entirely.11Robert J. Spitzer, The Politics of Gun Control, 7th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2018), 93. The result? Recent studies have found a correlation between higher crime rates and liberalized laws. One study found that states that adopted liberalized carry laws experienced a 13–15 percent increase in violent crime in the 10 years following enactment.12John R. Donohue, Abhay Aneja, and Kyle D. Weber, “Right-to-Carry Laws and Violent Crime,” (National Bureau of Economic Research, NBER Working Paper No. 23510, June 2017). Another found that the adoption of shall issue laws was associated with an increase in handgun homicides of over 10 percent.13Michael Siegel, et al., “Easiness of Legal Access to Concealed Firearm Permits and Homicide Rates in the United States,” American Journal of Public Health 107, no. 2 (December 2017): 1923–29.

Finally, a large and growing number of studies have examined the global effect of stronger versus weaker gun laws (wide variation in gun law strictness across the states facilitates this examination). They all conclude that a stronger gun regulatory regime results in fewer gun fatalities and injuries, extending to homicides, suicides, and accidents, although the favorable effect on gun suicides is generally greatest.14For example:
→Katherine A. Vittes, Jon S. Vernick, and Daniel W. Webster, “Legal Status and Source of Offenders’ Firearms in States with the Least Stringent Criteria for Gun Ownership,” Injury Prevention 19 (2013): 26–31.
→Eric W. Fleegler et al., “Firearm Legislation and Firearm-Related Fatalities in the United States,” JAMA Internal Medicine 173, no. 9 (May 13, 2013): 732–40.
→Julian Santaella-Tenorio et al., “What Do We Know about the Association between Firearm Legislation and Firearm-Related Injuries?” Epidemiologic Reviews 38, no. 1 (2016): 140–57.
→Bindu Kalesan, et al., “Firearm Legislation and Firearm Mortality in the USA: A Cross-Sectional, State-Level Study,” The Lancet 387, no. 10030 (April 30, 2016): 1847–55. Even law enforcement benefits from stricter gun laws: a recent study found that fatal police shootings were half as likely to occur in states with the strictest gun laws compared with those having the least strict laws.15Aaron J. Kivisto, Bradley Ray, and Peter L. Phalen, “Firearm Legislation and Fatal Police Shootings in the United States,” American Journal of Public Health 107, no. 7 (July 2017): 1068–75.

Future research directions

The very process of government-supported gun violence research funding has been undermined in recent decades by measures like the 1996 Dickey Amendment, which barred government funding for research to “advocate or promote gun control.”16As a result, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health halted such funding (ironically, sponsor and former Rep. Jay Dickey renounced the measure in 2015). Spitzer, The Politics of Gun Control, 225–26. The restoration of this funding would be a significant aid to research. Another amendment, the Tiahrt Amendment, has since 2004 barred anyone aside from law enforcement from examining firearms-tracking data kept by the government. Even simple record-keeping is deficient: not all states report complete data on gun homicides, suicides, accidents, or killings by police in the line of duty, for example. And the aggregation and reporting of mental health data is even more sporadic among the states.

Many other future research directions arise from existing studies and gun realities. For example, what motivates gun ownership and use? What is the relationship between gun use and poverty? What risk factors encourage young people to carry guns? How are guns trafficked from the factory to a criminal act? How effective are recent “red flag” laws that allow law enforcement to take guns from people temporarily pending the outcome of an investigation if they exhibit certain warning signs of violence? What is the link between domestic violence, criminality, and guns?

Even a simple question like an accurate tally of annual school shootings is open to dispute. In early 2018, the US Department of Education reported almost 240 instances of a “school-related shooting” during 2015–16. But a separate follow-up investigation concluded that over two-thirds of these incidents didn’t occur. Obviously, basic descriptive data is essential to any proper understanding of the gun problem.

For anyone interested in gun violence research, research prospects abound.