Do Additional Gun Control Laws Have Much Potential To Reduce Gun Violence?

May 2022 brought two more in what seems like an endless series of mass shootings: On May 14, a gunman in Buffalo killed 10 people at a supermarket; and only a few days later on May 24 another gunman killed 19 students and 2 teachers at a school in Uvalde, Texas.

As is usual with these things, gun control advocates promptly seized the opportunity to demand that politicians “do something” about the gun violence. The “something” to be done as always consists of enacting more gun control statutes, on top of those that already exist.

But do additional gun control statutes really have the potential to make any significant dent in the existing level of gun violence? Almost certainly, the answer is no.

The two cited events seem, at first glance, to provide at least some support for the proposition that additional statutes could have some effect. The reason is that in both the Buffalo and Uvalde cases the gunmen had acquired their weapons legally. Buffalo (from CNN, May 18):

The 18-year-old man accused of mass murder at a Buffalo supermarket legally obtained an AR-15 style rifle. . . .

Uvalde (from Texas Tribune, May 25):

The gunman . . . legally purchased two AR platform rifles from a federally licensed gun store on two days: May 17 — just a day after his [18th] birthday — and May 20, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said. . . .

Since these weapons were acquired legally, then at least in theory a more restrictive law could have prevented acquisition of the weapon. But what restriction, exactly? One proposal widely mentioned would be a so-called “red flag” law, where people who are mentally disturbed (as both of these gunmen were) could have their right to own a gun taken away by court order. But neither of these gunmen had sufficient past criminal record that could have been used as a basis to get such an order against them.

How about a ban on “assault weapons”? Both of these gunmen used AR-15 type rifles, which some put in the “assault weapon” category. Surely, a ban on such weapons ought to be able to make a significant dent in deaths.

Remarkably, no. A couple of highly-publicized events like the two discussed here give a completely false impression about the role of rifles, or anything else that might be called an “assault weapon,” in the overall picture of gun violence. Here is a piece from the Pew Research Center (no friends of widespread gun ownership) from February 3, 2022, compiling data from the CDC and FBI on gun deaths in the U.S. in 2020. It turns out that rifles and/or “assault weapons” are an almost insignificant part of the picture:

In 2020, handguns were involved in 59% of the 13,620 U.S. gun murders and non-negligent manslaughters for which data is available, according to the FBI. Rifles – the category that includes guns sometimes referred to as “assault weapons” – were involved in 3% of firearm murders. Shotguns were involved in 1%.

Handguns are far and away the principal factor.

Many readers may recall that the federal government in 1994 actually enacted a nationwide ban on “assault weapons.” The ban remained in place for ten years, until 2004. Did it have any effect? From a 2019 piece by the Foundation for Economic Education, headline “Studies Find No Evidence That Assault Weapon Bans Reduce Homicide Rates”:

Between 1994 and 2004, the federal government banned the manufacture, sale, or transfer of assault weapons and large-capacity magazines. A subsequent Department of Justice study found no evidence that the ban had had any effect on gun violence and stated that “should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”

Also an insignificant part of the overall picture of gun deaths are mass shooting events like the ones in Buffalo and Uvalde. One mass shooting event may dominate the news for a week, but for every one of those there are hundreds of one-off killings that you never hear about, almost always using handguns. The Pew piece gives a figure for the number of murders in the U.S. in 2020 using a firearm as 19,384. How many of those arose in “mass shooting events”?

The FBI collects data on “active shooter incidents,” which it defines as “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” Using the FBI’s definition, 38 people – excluding the shooters – died in such incidents in 2020.

That 38 deaths would be only about 0.2% of the gun murders for the year, a completely insignificant part of the equation. To be fair, there is another group called the Gun Violence Archive that compiles the statistics differently, and has a different definition of a “mass shooting” to include any incident in which at least four people are shot (even if no one is killed). Under this alternative definition some 513 people died in “mass shootings” in 2020 in the U.S. That’s sounds more significant, but it’s still well less than 3% of the 19,384 gun murders.

And then there’s the fact that the large majority of gun killings are committed with guns that were acquired illegally. Thus, the people committing the murders are obviously not deterred by the legal restrictions already in place. What reason is there to think that additional restrictions will deter them any more?

In 2019, in the context of a previous round of agitation for more restrictions on gun ownership, then-Congressman John Faso made the following statement:

"The vast majority of crime that is gun related is committed by people who illegally are possessing that firearm."

That assertion brought the fact-checkers at PolitiFact down upon Faso. Clearly, they would have dearly loved to have been able to declare Faso’s assertion “false,” but the facts just wouldn’t back that up. They ended up declaring Faso’s statement to be “Mostly True.” A notable feature of the data relied on by PolitiFact for its conclusion is that the more restrictions on gun ownership a particular state has, the higher percentage of the gun violence is committed using illegally-acquired guns. That statistic should not surprise anyone.

More generally, we have in this country a wide range of regimes of gun control, and it is impossible to perceive any general correlation between the restrictiveness of the gun control regime and the level of gun crime. New York has a very restrictive gun control regime, and a relatively low murder rate (about 6 per 100,000 in New York City). The same goes for California, which also has a murder rate in the range of 6 per 100,000. But places like Chicago, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. also have very restrictive gun control regimes and yet have very high rates of gun violence (murder rates, mostly using handguns, are around 30 per 100,000 in Chicago, 58 for Baltimore, and 24 for Washington, DC). And meanwhile, states with relatively light restrictions on gun ownership like Florida and Texas have relative low rates of murder ( 7.8 per 100,000 for Florida, and 7.6 for Texas).

If strict gun control laws were the answer to gun violence, then clearly Chicago, Baltimore and Washington would have lower rates of gun violence than Florida and Texas. But they don’t.

So once again, after the current round of shootings followed by intense lobbying to “do something,” it is likely that little will be done. Basically, that’s because there is little that can be done. There are many crazy and violent people in the world, and it is beyond the capabilities of politicians and politics to eliminate the risk from such people.

Adding more and more restrictions on gun ownership is the way people who think the world can be perfected by more restrictions on freedom pursue their fantasy. The Second Amendment represents an alternative vision of how to live in an imperfect and unperfectible world.