Firearms and Violence A Critical Review (2005) / Chapter Skim
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4 Interventions Aimed at Illegal Firearm Acquisition
4 Interventions Aimed at Illegal Firearm Acquisition
Pages 72-101
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From page 72... ...
Market-based interventions intended to reduce criminal access to guns include taxes on weapons and ammunition, tougher regulation of federal firearm licensees, limits on the number of firearms that can be purchased in a given time period, gun bans, gun buy-backs, and enforcement of laws against illegal gun buyers or sellers. Other interventions that may have market effects -- for example, storage requirements (such as trigger locks or the placement of firearms in secure containers)
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From page 73... ...
No research has explored these effects, although they may be important in forming attitudes toward gun control proposals. HOW OFFENDERS OBTAIN FIREARMS Legal and Illegal Firearms Commerce In the United States, there are some 258 million privately owned firearms, including nearly 70 to 90 million handguns (Police Foundation, 1996; see also Table 3-2)
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From page 74... ...
. Transfers of secondhand firearms by unlicensed individuals form the secondary market, for which federal law does not require transaction records or criminal background checks of prospective gun buyers (Cook et al., 1995)
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From page 75... ...
A straw purchase occurs when the actual buyer, typically someone who is too young or otherwise proscribed, uses another person to execute the paperwork. Lying and buying refers to prohibited persons (e.g., felons and juveniles )
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From page 76... ...
Sheley and Wright's (1995) survey research suggests that juveniles paid less for guns acquired from informal and street sources than for guns acquired through normal retail outlets, such as gun stores and pawnshops: 61 percent of the juvenile
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From page 77... ...
Gun Sources There are three main types of evidence on the origins of guns for criminals and juveniles: survey research, BATF firearms trace data, and BATF firearms investigation data. Each provides different insights into the means by which offenders acquire firearms.
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From page 78... ...
78 drug by car street, or Reported house as family, friends market/fence outlet and addict, market/fence outlet friend, Firearm of Inmates drug family/friends black retail family black retail from Source Prison 31% 28% 27% 44% 26% 21% 90% dealer, as gift or or Acquisition Inmates trade, directly theft Criminals by Prison Firearm purchase theft purchase theft purchase 40-70% by through of retail cash direct rent/borrow, straw theft direct Acquisition Method Reported 27% 9% 43% 32% 24% Estimated indirectly 32% 12% Handgun of possessed recent recent Method inmate Measure Handgun by Most handgun -- incarcerated felons Most handgun -- incarcerated juveniles and Sources Rossi 4-1 Justice Wright (1993) of and and TABLE Study Bureau Statistics Wright (1994)
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From page 79... ...
. BATF Firearms Trace Data BATF firearms trace data, described in Chapter 3, have been used to document that firearms recovered by law enforcement have characteristics suggesting they were illegally diverted from legitimate firearms commerce to criminals and juveniles (see, e.g., Zimring, 1976; Kennedy et al., 1996; Wachtel, 1998; Cook and Braga, 2001)
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From page 80... ...
These migration patterns, however, do not necessarily explain the big differences in import and export patterns across source and destination states as well as the overrepresentation of new guns that show up in tight-control cities from other loose-control states. BATF Investigation Data While analyses of BATF trace data can document characteristics of crime guns that suggest illegal diversions from legitimate firearms commerce, trace data analyses cannot describe the illegal pathways through
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From page 81... ...
BATF also conducts numerous investigations both in the course of monitoring FFL and distributor compliance with regulations and following detection of gun trafficking offenses. Analyses of BATF firearms trafficking investigation data provide insights on the workings of illegal firearms markets (see, e.g., Moore, 1981; Wachtel, 1998)
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From page 82... ...
Violations by FFLs in these investigations included "off paper" sales, false entries in record books, and transfers to prohibited persons. Nearly half of the investigations involved firearms trafficked by straw purchasers, either directly or indirectly.
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From page 83... ...
.3 Furthermore, there are many types of individuals (legal possessors, juveniles, convicted felons and other persons prohibited from legal gun possession)
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From page 84... ...
and increasing sentences for purchasing from unlicensed dealers (secondary market)
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From page 85... ...
Those same measures are unlikely to have much effect on the risks faced in straw purchase transactions, which will be raised for example by tougher enforcement of FFL record-keeping requirements. While we will refer to a single supply curve for firearms to offenders, it is the sum of a number of components.
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From page 86... ...
While it is not known what proportion of crime guns come from gun shows or what proportion of gun show dealers act criminally, research suggests that criminals do illegally acquire guns at these venues through unlicensed dealers, corrupt licensed dealers, and straw purchasers (Braga and Kennedy, 2000)
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From page 87... ...
in each market. Note again that the principal market for offenders is conceptualized as illegal diversions from retail outlets, such as convicted felons personally lying and buying or using false identification to acquire guns, straw purchasers illegally diverting legally purchased guns, and corrupt licensed dealers falsifying transaction paperwork or making off-thebook sales.
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From page 88... ...
Vintage enters the framework through type: new and old guns may be seen as different types with particular policy relevance because there are different interventions for each type. In spite of the vast numbers of used guns that could be stolen and then transferred to criminals, the trace data suggest that a disproportionate fraction of crime guns are quite new, although, as noted in Chapter 2, it cannot be determined how well the trace data represent the total population of crime guns.
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From page 89... ...
We do not include taxes on firearms or ammunition because there are no evaluations of either kind of tax. Regulating Gun Dealers As already noted, criminals can acquire guns in the primary market by personally making illegal purchases, arranging straw purchases, and by finding corrupt FFLs willing to ignore transfer laws.
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From page 90... ...
However, in order for this approach to be effective in reducing gun violence, there must be limited substitution from regulated primary markets to unregulated secondary markets. In their analysis of trace data contained in BATF's Firearm Tracing System, Pierce et al.
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From page 91... ...
This study, however, used national BATF firearms trace data from 1990 through 1995, before the adoption of comprehensive tracing practices in most major cities and prior to BATF nationwide efforts to encourage law enforcement agencies to submit guns for tracing (Cook and Braga, 2001; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, 2000c)
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From page 92... ...
Underlying this intervention is the idea that some individuals make straw purchases in the primary market and then divert these guns to proscribed persons or others planning to do harm. Trace data analyses conducted by BATF suggest that handguns that were first sold as part of a multiple sale are more likely than others to move rapidly into criminal use (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, 2000c)
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From page 93... ...
In 1998, the background check provisions of the Brady act were extended to include the sales of long guns and the waiting period requirement was removed when, as mandated by the initial act, it became possible for licensed gun sellers to perform instant record checks on prospective buyers. The policy intent was to make gun purchases more difficult for prohibited persons, such as convicted felons, drug addicts, persons with certain diagnosed mental conditions, and persons under the legal age limit (18 for long rifles and shotguns, 21 for handguns)
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From page 94... ...
The authors suggest that the effectiveness of the Brady act in reducing homicides and most suicides was undermined by prohibited purchasers shifting from the primary market to the largely unregulated secondary market. While the Brady act had no direct effect on homicide rates, it is possible that it had an indirect effect, by reducing interstate gun trafficking and hence gun violence in the control states that already had similar laws.
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From page 95... ...
. Moreover, the authors found that the percentage of crime handguns first purchased in Illinois increased after the implementation of the Brady act, suggesting substitution from out-of-state FFLs to instate FFLs once the advantage of purchasing guns outside Illinois had been removed.
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From page 96... ...
They noted that in the six years following the buy-back, there were no mass murders with firearms and fewer mass murders than in the previous period; these are both weak tests given the small numbers of such incidents annually. Banning Assault Weapons In 1994, Congress enacted the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which banned the importation and manufacture of certain military-style semiautomatic "assault" weapons and ammunition magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds (National Institute of Justice, 1997)
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From page 97... ...
In a subsequent paper on the effects of the assault weapons ban on gun markets, Koper and Roth (2001a) found that, in the short term, the prices of assault weapons in both primary and legal secondary markets rose substantially at the time of the ban, and this may have reduced the availability of the assault weapons to criminals.
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From page 98... ...
The empirical evidence as to the success of the Washington, DC, handgun ban is mixed. Loftin et al.
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From page 99... ...
Most research has focused on determining whether prohibited persons illegally obtain firearms from legitimate commerce (legal primary and secondary markets) or whether crime guns are stolen or acquired through informal exchanges.
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From page 100... ...
The existing evidence is of limited value in assessing whether any specific market-focused firearm restrictions would curb harm. Thus, the committee recommends that work be started to think carefully about the prospects for achieving "conditional exogeneity," the kinds of interventions and covariates that are likely to 8We ignore for the moment corrupt agents at retail outlets, viewing them as the equivalent of straw purchasers.
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From page 101... ...
INTERVENTIONS AIMED AT ILLEGAL FIREARM ACQUISITION 101 satisfy this independence requirement, how one could gather the data, the potential for building in evaluation at the stage of policy change, and other possible research and data designs. Future work might begin by considering the utility of emerging data systems, described in this report, for studying the impact of different market interventions, This type of effort should be take place in collaboration with a group of survey statisticians, social scientists, and representatives from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the National Institute of Justice.
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