The Great Gun Regulation Debate

Gun sales in the United States are a huge business; the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) ran 19.5 million firearm background checks in 2012 alone. The recent tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, has reignited the national debate over how or how much the government should regulate firearms. In a study in the Journal of Urban Health by Daniel W. Webster, Jon S. Vernick, Maria T. Bulzacchelli, and Katherine A. Vittes titled “Temporal Association between Federal Gun Laws and the Diversion of Guns to Criminals in Milwaukee,” the authors examine the effects that changes in federal gun regulations can have on the number of firearms sold by licensed dealers that are later used in crimes.

The authors focused their study on licensed gun dealers in Milwaukee hoping to get a better sense of how changes in federal regulations might alter the number of legally purchased firearms later used in crimes. They gave particular attention to a single area dealer, Badger Guns and Ammo, identified by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) in 1999 as the national leader in the number of guns sold which were later linked to crimes. In response to the ATF’s announcement, the owner of the store announced that he would no longer sell the types of guns most commonly used in crime – inexpensive handguns, referred to as “junk guns” – in his store. Four years later, Congress passed the Tiahrt amendment, which, with a series of follow up amendments, restricts federal firearm regulatory and enforcement powers. Among other limitations, the amendments prohibit the ATF from responding to public requests for gun crime trace data and from requiring gun dealers to do physical inventory of their stock during compliance inspections. To this day, many gun control advocates argue that these changes inhibit the federal government’s ability to hold firearms dealers accountable. The authors examine how the passage of the Tiahrt amendment might have affected the number of firearms sold by Badger that were eventually involved in crimes.

Unlike some major city departments, the Milwaukee Police Department traces all guns recovered from a crime scene. Because of their voluntary decision to stop selling junk guns in 1999 and the Milwaukee Police Department’s careful tracing procedures, Badger represented a useful case study for the researchers at a time when the restrictions created by the Tiahrt amendment made it difficult to collect data from other sources. The researchers broke their data into three distinct periods: before Badger announced it would stop selling junk guns (July 1996 to April 1999), after it stopped sales of junk guns but before the passage of the Tiahrt amendment (May 1999 to February 2003) and a period after the passage of the Tiahrt amendment (March 2003 to December 2005).

The authors run a number of regressions on the data to look at criminal diversions of both junk guns and non-junk guns at Badger during the selected periods, using other retailers in the Milwaukee area as a control. They find that the number of guns sold by Badger that were eventually used in a crime decreased by 66 percent after the owner decided to discontinue selling junk guns. However, after the Tiahrt amendment was passed the number of guns used in crime traced to Badger increased by over 100 percent.

The authors acknowledge that these trends were not observed in a statistically significant way among other retailers included in the study and are careful to point out that making causal assumptions about the observed results is difficult. However, they note that the increase in the number of Badger guns traced to crimes after the passage of the Tiahrt amendment is consistent with their expectations of what a large gun dealer might do after some mechanisms for legal and public accountability were removed. With fewer avenues for legal and public recourse, they reason, there is less incentive for the dealer to avoid selling guns to dubious customers, and the Badger data could support this assertion.

Given the nature of gun politics in the United States, a resolution to the current debate is likely only after extensive discussion and deliberation. This research presents thought-provoking insight into the potential ramifications of regulatory decisions in the firearms industry.

Feature Photo: cc/(Curtis Gregory Perry)