Assault Weapons Ban Research Articles

Cross-Border Spillover: U.S. Gun Laws and Violence in Mexico

To what extent, and under what conditions, does access to arms fuel violent crime? To answer this question, we exploit a unique natural experiment: the 2004 expiration of the U.S. Federal Assault Weapons Ban exerted a spillover on gun supply in Mexican municipios near Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, but not near California, which retained a pre-existing state-level ban. We find first that Mexican municipios located closer to the non-California border states experienced differential increases in homicides, gun-related homicides, and crime gun seizures after 2004. Second, the magnitude of this effect is contingent on political factors related to Mexico's democratic transition. Killings increased disproportionately in municipios where local elections had become more competitive prior to 2004, with the largest differentials emerging in high narco-trafficking areas. Our findings suggest that competition undermined informal agreements between drug cartels and entrenched local governments, highlighting the role of political conditions in mediating the gun-crime relationship.

Agent Based Simulation of Mass Shootings: Determining How to Limit the Scale of a Tragedy

An agent-based simulation was created to examine key parameters in mass shootings. The goal of the simulation was to examine the potential effectiveness of Senator Dianne Feinstein's (D-Calif.) assault weapons and high-capacity magazines bill. Based on the analysis, the proposed law would have a negligible effect on the number of people shot during mass shootings. The assault weapons portion of the proposed bill will have no effect on the number of people killed or wounded in a mass shooting. The assault weapons ban does not seek to decrease the rate of fire of any firearm. Of the parameters tested a weapon's rate of fire has the greatest effect on the number of people wounded or killed by that weapon. However, a ban on high-capacity magazines will result in a small number of lives saved during a mass shooting. This paper demonstrates simulation's ability to examine proposed policies and provide a framework for more meaningful discussions.

Cross-Border Spillover: U.S. Gun Laws and Violence in Mexico

To what extent, and under what conditions, does access to arms fuel violent crime? To answer this question, we exploit a unique natural experiment: the 2004 expiration of the U.S. Federal Assault Weapons Ban exerted a spillover on gun supply in Mexican municipios near Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, but not near California, which retained a pre-existing state-level ban.We find first that Mexican municipios located closer to the non-California border states experienced differential increases in homicides, gun-related homicides and crime gun seizures in the post-2004 period. Second, the magnitude of this effect is contingent on political factors related to Mexico's democratic transition. Killings increased substantially more in municipios where local elections had become more competitive prior to 2004, with the largest differentials emerging in high narco-trafficking areas. Our findings are consistent with the notion that political competition undermined informal agreements between drug cartels and entrenched local governments, highlighting the role of political instability in mediating the gun-crime relationship.

Kids and Assault Weapons

The sunset of the federal assault weapons ban in September 2004 increased the political and scholarly debate about the criminal use of such firearms. Some of the debate is alarmist, suggesting that juveniles have easy access to these firearms and are likely to use them in violent offenses. These perspectives are reinforced on television and in films and contribute to perceptions about the sophistication of weapons that juveniles possess, as well as to the punishments that juveniles should face. This study examines firearms recovered from juvenile offenders in both national and city samples from 1992 to 2000 and finds that assault weapons are seldom used or possessed by juveniles. Our findings suggest that the disjuncture between popular perceptions and the reality of juvenile gun use has been socially constructed by four different groups: the police, news and entertainment organizations, interest groups, and juveniles themselves.

The Impact of the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban on Gun Markets: An Assessment of Short-Term Primary and Secondary Market Effects

The reactions of the gun market, including those of producers, wholesalers, retailers, and consumers, play an important role in shaping the potential impact of gun control policies on gun crime. As a case in point, this paper examines the federal Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which bans a group of military-style semiautomatic firearms (i.e., assault weapons). Using a variety of national and local data sources, we assess the short-term (1994–1996) impact of the assault weapons ban on gun markets, examining trends in prices and production of the banned weapons in legal markets and assessing the availability of the banned weapons in illicit markets as measured by criminal use. Prices of assault weapons rose substantially around the time of the ban's enactment, reducing the availability of assault weapons to criminal users in the very short run. However, a surge in assault weapon production just before the ban caused prices to fall in the months following the ban. Implications of the findings for assessing this and other gun control policies are discussed.

Assessing the Democratic Debate: How the News Media Frame Elite Policy Discourse

This article examines the way in which the news media frame public policy issues and the extent to which other political players (e.g., interest groups, politicians) influence this issue framing process. Our analysis focuses on the issue of gun control, comparing the rhetoric generated by interest groups and public officials on the Brady Bill and Assault Weapons Ban with actual network news coverage of this legislation from 1988 to 1996. Results indicate that both sets of political players employed several interpretative issue frames and worked hard to put their preferred themes on the agenda. However, at times, the media intervened in the framing process, especially as the debate matured. Specifically, the news media (a) structured the overall tone of the gun control debate, (b) adopted a distribution of framing perspectives different from that of politicians and interest groups, and (c) packaged policy discourse more often than not in terms of the "culture of violence" theme. These findings point toward previously ignored media effects and attest to the potential role the media play in shaping public policy debates.

People's Rights Organization, Inc. v. City of Columbus: The Sixth Circuit Shoots down Another Unconstitutional Assault Weapons Ban

People's Rights Organization, Inc. v. City of Columbus: The Sixth Circuit Shoots down Another Unconstitutional Assault Weapons Ban

Gun lobbies and gun control: Senate voting patterns on the Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban

This paper uses an econometric model to analyze the political and economic factors affecting the Senate voting patterns on the 1993 Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban. Results of a logit estimation procedure support the hypothesis that the political activities and presence of the National Rifle Association (measured as relative campaign contributions and membership) had a significant impact on the voting patterns by Senators on both bills.

The impact of legislator and constituency ideology on voting on the assault weapons ban

Using variables that represent a legislator's entire legal constituency, previous research by social scientists has concluded that views of the legislator's constituency have little effect on how legislators vote. This question is reexamined by defining constituency as those voters most likely to vote for the legislator (i.e., members of the legislator's own political party and independents). Furthermore, instead of measuring constituency by either a demographic or vote-based measure, a survey measure of the ideological identification of voters (i.e., the voter's self-identification as liberal, moderate, or conservative) is introduced. It is found that the ideology of a senator's electoral constituency was an important factor on the recent U.S. Senate vote to ban 19 semi-automatic assault weapons. The findings have important implications for how social scientists conceptualize and measure constituency.

Self-Interest, Ideology, and Logrolling in Congressional Voting

LAWS may be passed because of self-interest or because of ideology. All national laws are ultimately passed by Congress; therefore, an analysis of the factors which determine the way in which congressmen vote can be used to determine the extent to which each of these factors is involved in passage of legislation. Because of the development of statistical tools such as logit analysis, which enable the analyst to handle situations in which the dependent variable is dichotomous, determinants of voting have recently been examined using roll-call voting data. The basic technique in this work has been to define the vote by a congressman on a bill as the dichotomous dependent variable and to use economic factors associated with the district as independent variables. But if this research is to proceed, it is necessary to separate out the factors-self-interest, logrolling, and ideology-which actually determine voting. This separation is the purpose of this paper. Kau and Rubin' and Silberman and Durden2 have analyzed voting on minimum wages; Danielsen and Rubin3 have examined voting on energy issues; Davis and Jackson4 have examined voting on income redistribution; and Kau and Rubins have examined the effect of public-interest lobbies such as Common Cause on the legislative process. Thus, statistical analysis of roll-call voting has been, and is likely to continue to be, a useful tool. This work in economics has differed somewhat from related work by political

Voting on Minimum Wages: A Time-Series Analysis

In a recent paper, Silberman and Durden (1976; hereafter S-D) examined economic factors associated with voting by representatives on changes in the minimum wage in 1973. They found, among other results, that the number of low-wage workers in a congressional district is positively associated with voting for higher minimum wages by representatives from the district. This result is somewhat surprising; in fact, S-D were unable to predict a priori the sign of this variable. As Browning (1975) has shown, since the late 1 960s there has been a substantial increase in transfers to lowincome persons, particularly in terms of income in kind. Thus, in 1973 the losses of those who became unemployed by higher minimum wages may have been relatively smaller than losses in earlier periods. This would have reduced the cost to low-wage workers of the "unemployment effect" (S-D, p. 321) and might have served to make such workers, net, more favorably disposed to passage of such laws. In addition, the 1964 Voting Rights Act enfranchised many blacks. Blacks are typically low-paid workers; thus, they would have strong interest in minimum-wage legislation. Time-series analysis should enable us to determine any changes in the influence of blacks on voting by representatives and thus enable us to ascertain if the Voting Rights Act has any influence on minimum-wage legislation. Possibilities of detecting such changes make time series a useful adjunct to cross-section analysis. This note is a time-series study of economic determinants of passage of minimumwage legislation. The econometric technique used is probit analysis. A (0, 1) variable is defined over all representatives, with 0 being a vote against the minimum wage and 1 being a vote in favor. In each year, we used the vote on final passage of the law rather than on amendments, for this enables us to compare votes and influences over time. We use all years in which there was an actual legislated change in the minimum wage; we omit years such as 1973 in which minimum wages were considered but not passed. (In 1973 the increase in the minimum wage was vetoed by the president.)