Firearms And Federal Law: The Gun Control Act Of 1968

Firearms And Federal Law: The Gun Control Law Of 1968 Part 5: IV. CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS The present study was intended both as an investigation of the impact of a single piece of legislation and as an attempt to gain perspective on larger issues relating to guns, gun controls, and the legislative process. This section addresses a few of these larger issues. In doing so, I will often venture opinions that are not rigorously supported by existing data. Without doubt, the role of firearms in American violence is much greater in 1975 than in 1968. Rates of gun violence and the proportion of violent acts that are committed by guns have increased substantially since the Gun Control Act went into effect. Behind these increases lies the probability that [Page 195] handgun ownership has become at least a subcultural institution in the big cities which are the main arena of American violence. During this period, regional differences in gun ownership and use have been moderated as the large northeastern cities that were traditionally areas of low ownership and use have experienced large increases in handgun use. The special role of the handgun in urban violence is one of the more obvious lessons of the data we have assembled. For many purposes it seems more appropriate to divide recent fluctuations in homicide and assault into "handgun" and "other" categories than to speak of homicide rates as an aggregate¾since 1966, rates of handgun homicide have increased more than three times as much as homicides by all other means. The data gathered in the present effort suggest, but do not compel, two other conclusions about patterns of handgun ownership and violence in the United States. First, the sharp rise in the proportion of violence attributable to handguns in northeastern cities may lead to modification of the hypothesis that general patterns of handgun ownership determine the extent to which handguns are used in violent episodes. While it is still true that those regions with the highest general levels of gun ownership have the highest proportion of gun use in violence, the past decade has produced an increase in handgun use in the Northeast that leaves cities in that region closer to but still below the national average handgun share of violence. This could be due to a substantial rise in handgun ownership in the general population in these cities, but that would mean that a vast northeastern urban handgun arsenal has been accumulating during the past ten years. It is more likely that handgun ownership increased substantially among subcultural groups disproportionately associated with violence without necessarily affecting other parts of the population. It is, to give a concrete example, neither necessary nor likely that gun ownership among middle-class New York Jews (other than small merchants) has increased dramatically in the past decade as New York handgun homicide has increased. If one adopts a "subcultural" explanation of the relationship between gun ownership and violence, hypotheses about the effect of increases or decreases in handgun ownership on handgun violence should take a slightly more complicated form. One would predict that high levels of handgun ownership produce high levels of handgun violence for two reasons: more handguns are available at a moment of perceived need and high ownership rates necessarily suggest high levels of handgun availability to all potential consumers. Low general levels of handgun ownership, on the other hand, become the necessary but not sufficient condition of low levels of handgun violence. If the lower-than-average general ownership levels are still high enough to create relatively easy handgun availability, and if both handgun ownership and propensity for violence are concentrated in discrete subpopulations, lower-than-average gen- [Page 196] eral ownership is an inadequate insurance policy against increases in handgun violence. It is only when ownership levels are low enough to have an impact on handgun availability that low aggregate ownership will depress handgun involvement in rates of subcultural violence. A second tentative implication of this study¾somewhat more directly inferred from the data¾is the so-called "new guns" hypothesis discussed earlier. For reasons that have not yet been adequately explored, new handguns are involved in crime at higher rates than older handguns. This may be of importance in designing firearms control strategies and also suggests need for further refining hypotheses about the relationship between general levels of handgun ownership and the rate of handgun use in crime. In urban settings where new handguns are available these guns are purchased by persons who plan to use them. Older handguns include a large number that are packed away in attics or kept in homes for self-protection. Such weapons show up in crimes or confiscations only if used by their owners or transferred by sale or theft to other individuals. One would thus expect a smaller proportion of older guns to be confiscated. As long as the chances of transfer are relatively small, each new handgun will have much more impact on handgun availability than each older gun owned by the civilian population. As long as the average person who wants to buy a handgun this month is more likely to misuse it than the average person who already owns one, handgun availability will have more impact on trends in violence than handgun ownership. What have we learned about the role of the federal government in gun control? The data presented in these pages cannot show that a particular strategy of firearms control is appropriate for the future, for that is an issue that requires value determinations as well as empirical data. The data do suggest, however, that any further initiatives in gun control should be focused on handguns. There is also, in the history of the administration of the Act, an intriguing contrast between what I would call "gatekeeping" and policing strategies of federal control. Whatever went wrong with the prohibition on imported ."Saturday Night Specials," enforcing the ban was clean white-collar work of a type normally undertaken by federal regulatory agencies. Attempts to keep handguns away from criminals and outside the borders of tight-control jurisdictions require more police work. In this effort the role of A.T.F. is best compared with the narcotics enforcement efforts of the federal government. Efforts to limit handgun supply on a national basis, by limiting legitimate production, or imports, or both, will not require a large federal street police force. At the point when market controls make illicit gun production profitable, some police work will obviously be needed, along the lines of controls on illicit. liquor production. Any federal control strategy that seeks to regulate firearms possession with- [Page 197] out regulating production and imports requires more policing, both because the number of guns will remain large and because keeping guns out of the hands of subclasses of the population is extraordinarily difficult when guns are freely available to others. There is, however, one important difference between the criminal enforcement of federal narcotics laws and present federal gun laws: virtually all guns that come into illegitimate hands come from the legitimate market. For this reason, records kept by dealers may provide criminal enforcement agents with an information base that is not present in narcotics control. But as long as transaction records are decentralized and limited to first purchases, this advantage is of limited importance. Data from the first five years after the Gun Control Act are a poor source of information on the consequences of handgun scarcity, because handguns have not been scarce. Thus, the extent to which handgun use would be replaced by long guns and the use of "homemade" weapons in crime cannot be tested by examining the impact of the 1968 Act. It is also important to note that the relatively small proportion of violence attributed to older handguns in New York City does not mean that older guns will not be a more serious problem if the flow of new handguns is interrupted. If production and imports are interrupted, the primary source of handguns would be the existing civilian inventory. The pressure to acquire guns would drive up the price of older guns, creating incentives for both owners and prospective burglars that increase the chances that old handguns will be transferred to new owners. Again, however, experience since 1968 gives no basis on which to estimate the extent or consequences of this tendency. Thus, studying the impact of the Gun Control Act gives only limited insight into the consequences of more restrictive federal gun control policies. I am also convinced that the legislative history of both the 1969 and 1938 Acts tell us little about the shape of future federal gun control efforts. It is possible (vide the Federal Firearms Act of 1938) that the Gun Control Act of 1968 will be controlling federal law into the next century. But political sentiments about firearms control may prove more fluid than some commentators believe. It is only if the firearms issue remains as unimportant as it has been to date that one can predict future legislative behavior from prior congressional action. Whatever the future holds, the federal Congress is unprepared to make intelligent policy choices concerning the federal role in firearms regulation. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, with all its faults, has an informational monopoly on firearms regulation. No committee of the Congress has paid sustained attention to the administration of the Act, or prodded the Bureau toward producing the kind of information that is needed for intelligent planning. With sporadic exceptions, those members of Congress [Page 198] that introduce new firearms proposals are failing to obtain or use available information. In the near future any real reform in the administration of the Act will have to be internally generated by the Bureau. If Congress is supposed to be the policy-setting institution, the Gun Control Act of 1968 may stand as an example of the blind leading the halt.