The Business of Guns

many gun freedom advocates view mandatory buybacks as no different from gun seizures, which is one of the core fears of pro-gun politicians, voters, and lobbyists. Restrictions and Bans: How Effective Are They? With both individual city-wide bans on particular weapons as well as the national ban on assault weapons from 1994 to 2004, social scientists and criminologists have a large amount of data that can be used to study the impact of banning or restricting particular classes of weapons. Many big cities banned classes of weapons, especially handguns, during the 1970s and 1980s, although later U.S. Supreme Court decisions overturned those bans. Like the other options for the mitigation of illegal gun purchases discussed in this chapter, the impact of bans has not provided conclusive evidence of failure or success. This is due to the prevalence of available guns on the black market, as well as the relative rarity of some guns (especially assault rifles) used in crimes before, during, and after the ban. Researchers on the assault weapons ban in particular criticized the lack of conclusive data. Gary Kleck, author of Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America (1991), noted that the low number of assault weapons used in everyday crime means that any statistical decrease would be hard to separate from simple variation or mathematical randomness. Other researchers have concluded that the price of assault weapons rose in both legal and black markets, but could only suggest that this potentially, rather than definitively, reduced access to these guns by criminals. Finally, the data on assault weapons bans are not necessarily conclusive, because many guns can be modified to function with speed, power, or accuracy similar to assault weapons.

Chapter 5: Stopping Illegal Sales

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