11
R e s e a r c h i n B r i e f
Carlson, The Identification of Patterns in Fire-
arms Trafficking: Implications for Focused
Enforcement Strategy, Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Department of the Treasury, Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco and Firearms, 1995; and Violence
Policy Center, More Gun Dealers Than Gas Sta-
tions: A Study of Federally Licensed Firearms
Dealers in America, Washington, D.C.:
Violence Policy Center, 1992.
6. Like assault weapons prices, large capacity
magazine prices generally doubled in the year
preceding the ban. However, trends diverged
after the ban, depending on the gun for which
the magazine was made. See Chapter 4 in Roth,
Jeffrey A., and Christopher S. Koper, Impact
Evaluation of the Public Safety and Recre-
ational Firearms Use Protection Act of 1994,
Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute, 1997.
7. American Medical Association Council on
Scientific Affairs, “Assault Weapons as a
Public Health Hazard in the United States,”
Journal of the American Medical Association,
267 (1992): 3067–3070.
8. Mathews, J., “Unholstering the Gun Ban,”
The Washington Post, December 31, 1989.
9. Cook, Philip J., and James A. Leitzel,
“ ‘Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy’: An Economic
Analysis of the Attack on Gun Control,” Law
and Contemporary Problems, 59 (1996):
91–118.
10. Since enactment of the Gun Control Act of
1968, FFLs are required to retain records of all
gun sales and a running log of their gun acqui-
sitions and dispositions. Federal law has
various regulations governing sales by FFLs,
including the requirement that FFLs have po-
tential gun purchasers sign statements that they
are not legally ineligible to purchase firearms.
The 1993 Brady Act further requires FFLs to
obtain photo identification of potential handgun
purchasers, notify the chief local law enforce-
ment officer of each application for a handgun
purchase, and wait 5 business days before com-
pleting the sale, during which time the chief
law enforcement officer may check the
applicant’s eligibility.
FFLs who sell guns without following these re-
quirements may, if inspected by BATF, try to
cover up their illegal sales by claiming that the
guns were lost or stolen. To help prevent such
practices, Subtitle C of Title XI requires FFLs
to report all stolen and lost firearms to BATF
and local authorities within 48 hours.
Gun transfers made by nonlicensed citizens do
not require such recordkeeping. In some in-
stances, however, gun owners who knowingly
transfer guns to ineligible purchasers may
choose to falsely report the guns as stolen to
prevent themselves from being linked to any
crimes committed with the guns.
11. This finding is a revision of results reported
in Chapter 4 of Roth and Koper, Impact Evalu-
ation of the Public Safety and Recreational
Firearms Use Protection Act of 1994.
12. Zimring, Franklin E., “Street Crime and New
Guns: Some Implications for Firearms Control,”
Journal of Criminal Justice, 4 (1976): 95–107.
13. A gun trace usually tracks a gun to its
first point of sale by a licensed dealer. Upon
request, BATF traces guns suspected of being
used in crime as a service to Federal, State, and
local law enforcement agencies.
14. For additional discussions of the limits of
tracing data, see Chapter 5 in Roth and Koper,
Impact Evaluation of the Public Safety and Rec-
reational Firearms Use Protection Act of 1994;
Zawitz, Marianne W., Guns Used in Crime,
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice,
Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1995; and Kleck,
Gary, Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their
Control, New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1997.
15. Percentage decreases in assault weapon
traces related to violent and drug crimes were
similar to or greater than those for total assault
weapons, although these categories were quite
small in number. Separate analyses were con-
ducted for all assault weapons and for a select
group of domestically produced assault weap-
ons that were still in production when the ban
went into effect. Both analyses showed the same
drop in overall trace requests. See Chapter 5 in
Roth and Koper, Impact Evaluation of the Pub-
lic Safety and Recreational Firearms Use
Protection Act of 1994.
16. In general, our analysis of assault weapons
use did not include legal substitute versions of
the banned weapons. However, lack of preci-
sion in the data sources could have resulted
in some of these weapons being counted as
postban traces or recoveries of assault weapons.
17. For example, see Beck, Allen, Darrell
Gilliard, Lawrence Greenfeld, Caroline Harlow,
Thomas Hester, Louis Jankowski, Tracy Snell,
James Stephan, and Danielle Morton, Survey of
State Prison Inmates, 1991, Washington, D.C.:
U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice
Statistics, 1993; Hargarten, Stephen W., Trudy
A. Karlson, Mallory O’Brien, Jerry Hancock,
and Edward Quebbeman, “Characteristics of
Firearms Involved in Fatalities,” Journal of the
American Medical Association, 275 (1996):
42–45; Hutson, H. Range, Deirdre Anglin, and
Michael J. Pratts, Jr., “Adolescents and Chil-
dren Injured or Killed in Drive-by Shootings
in Los Angeles,” The New England Journal of
Medicine, 330 (1994): 324–327; Kleck, Gary,
Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control,
New York: Aldine De Gruyter 1997; Cox News-
papers, Firepower: Assault Weapons in America,
Washington, D.C.: Cox Newspapers, 1989;
McGonigal, Michael D., John Cole, C. William
Schwab, Donald R. Kauder, Michael F.
Rotondo, and Peter B. Angood, “Urban Firearm
Deaths: A Five-Year Perspective,” The Journal
of Trauma, 35 (1993): 532–536; New York
State Division of Criminal Justice Services,
Assault Weapons and Homicide in New York
City, Albany, New York: New York State Divi-
sion of Criminal Justice Services, 1994; Zawitz,
Marianne W., Guns Used in Crime; also see
review in Koper, Christopher S., Gun Lethality
and Homicide: Gun Types Used by Criminals
and the Lethality of Gun Violence in Kansas
City, Missouri, 1985–1993, Ann Arbor,
Michigan: University Microfilms, Inc., 1995.
18. See Chapter 6 in Roth and Koper, Impact
Evaluation of the Public Safety and Recre-
ational Firearms Use Protection Act of 1994;
and New York State Division of Criminal Jus-
tice Services, Assault Weapons and Homicide in
New York City.
19. In addition to the variables discussed in the
text, the models included an indicator variable
for each State, a polynomial time trend for the
national gun homicide trend, and annual State-
level controls for per capita income, employ-
ment rates, and age structure of the population.
20. By conventional standards, we mean statis-
tical power of 0.8 to detect a change, with 0.05
probability of a Type I error.
21. Pierce et al., The Identification of Patterns
in Firearms Trafficking: Implications for
Focused Enforcement Strategy.
22. Sherman, Lawrence W., James W. Shaw,
and Dennis P. Rogan, The Kansas City Gun Ex-
periment, Research in Brief, Washington, D.C.:
U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute
of Justice, 1995, NCJ 150855