Cars, Guns The Best Weapons For Killing Americans - COVID Catching Up

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Despite the fact that mass shootings are predominantly an American 
phenomenon, gun advocates are quick to insist that there is nothing we can do 
to prevent them. Instead, they suggest these murders could only be reduced by 
having more armed civilians — aka “good guys with guns” — roaming the 
streets, a solution that inevitably involves fewer gun regulations and more 
gun ownership. Reducing gun violence through straightforward policies of the 
sort implemented in virtually every other industrialized nation is regarded 
as a chimera by the National Rifle Association. After all, criminals don’t 
follow laws, so what would be the point?

John R. Lott, the author of More Guns, Less Crime, recently evoked a version 
of this slogan in a piece for The Daily Caller, arguing that closing the 
loopholes in the background check system would not have stopped the 
Charleston mass shooting from happening. The alleged killer’s record included 
an admission of drug use that should have blocked the purchase when he bought 
his Glock from a licensed dealer, but an FBI examiner didn’t catch it in time 
and the sale was allowed to go through by default. Even if had been denied, 
Lott reasoned, “[i]t seems hard to believe that he couldn’t have figured out 
some way of obtaining a gun.”

What makes this line of reasoning especially pernicious is that it extends 
beyond mass shootings, deployed by pro-gun activists and politicians as an 
indictment of any laws regulating firearms. As Senator Marco Rubio, a 
Republican presidential candidate, likes to say, “My skepticism about gun 
laws is criminals don’t follow the law. They don’t care what the law is, you 
can pass any law you want and criminals won’t follow it.”
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It turns out, however, that the scientific evidence suggests precisely the 
opposite: criminals routinely respond to incentives, and policies such as 
background checks and permit-to-purchase requirements demonstrably save lives 
by reducing criminal access to firearms. The problem, these studies show, 
isn’t that criminals don’t follow laws, but rather that criminals aren’t 
dissuaded by weak laws. And gun laws in all but a few states are decidedly 
weak.
Understanding Unregulated Gun Markets

Ever since the 1993 passage of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, 
which required all federally licensed gun retailers to enforce background 
checks on firearm purchases, criminals including felons, fugitives, some 
convicted domestic abusers and drug addicts have been unable to simply walk 
into a store with a federal firearms license (FFL) and buy a firearm. Rather, 
a criminal seeking to obtain a gun can do so in one of three ways. He can 
have a so-called “straw purchaser” illegally acquire a gun for him from a 
federally licensed dealer, and hope neither of them gets caught. He can steal 
a gun himself. Or he can find a seller who won’t subject the transaction to a 
background check.

While it may seem that the mere availability of these options undermine most 
gun safety initiatives, the reality is far more complex. To understand how 
gun laws influence criminal behavior, it is important to understand how the 
unregulated gun market functions in the United States. This market is 
comprised of both private sales (such as those taking place at gun shows or 
online) and black market transactions (such as a gang member buying a stolen 
gun from a street source), but ultimately the line separating the two is 
often blurry. Indeed, illegal transactions occurring in the black market — 
often involving guns transferred from one criminal to another — are properly 
understood as a subset of a much larger gray market encompassing all sales 
that don’t require background checks. Estimates from 1994 indicated that 
around 40 percent of all firearm sales happen that way. Two decades later, 
with the explosion of online marketplaces facilitating private firearm 
transactions, there is no good data on the number of guns supplied through 
the gray market.

While we don’t know the overall size of the unregulated gun market, we do 
know, anecdotally, that it provides guns to criminals who wouldn’t pass a 
background check. On Oct. 21, 2012, for example, Zina Daniel’s estranged 
husband burst into the Azana Day Salon in Brookfield, Wisconsin, wielding a 
handgun he purchased through an online source despite having a prohibitive 
restraining order. The gunman murdered her and two others, and wounded 
another four women, before killing himself.

In March of 2010, a man with a history of mental illness opened fire in front 
of the Pentagon, wounding two police officers before he was killed by return 
fire. A California resident, he had attempted to purchase a firearm at a gun 
store in January but was denied due to the state’s strict background check 
laws. He then crossed the border to Nevada, where he was easily able to buy 
one from a private seller at a gun show, no background check required.

These two stories — and many others like them — are merely a small fraction 
of the often lethal consequences of the gray market. A Bureau of Justice 
Statistics study from 2001 found that nearly 80 percent of criminal offenders 
reported that they had obtained their most recent firearm through private 
channels, such as through friends or street sources. This illegal portion of 
the unregulated market is fueled, in part, by the roughly quarter million 
guns stolen in the U.S. each year, according to the Department of Justice.
How Laws Stem the Flow of Guns in the Gray Market

Wayne LaPierre of the NRA frequently casts doubt on the ability of 
regulations to curb criminal behavior, stating earlier this year that “we 
don’t have to guess how hardened criminals will get their guns if universal 
background checks are passed, because we already know how they get them now: 
through theft, black market purchases, criminal associates, and straw 
purchasers. Background checks cannot and do not stop any of these things.”

Contrary to LaPierre’s pessimism regarding the apparent futility of trying to 
stem the tide of illegal guns, Philip Cook of Duke University and several 
colleagues have found that it is the flow of firearms, not the volume, that 
is the key factor in gun crime. These market characteristics mean that 
regulations on transactions, even in the legal channels, can help increase 
costs in the black market and subsequently deter criminals from obtaining 
firearms. If gun regulations can effectively dampen the supply of new 
firearms and ammunition, thereby making transactions more challenging to 
complete, prices will rise and criminals will be more hesitant to obtain a 
firearm — and may even forgo it altogether.

These market influences were validated in a 2007 study by Cook and Jens 
Ludwig of the University of Chicago, which discovered a significant black 
market markup on the price of weapons relative to the cost in the legal 
market. The economics are perhaps most vivid in Chicago, where ammunition is 
largely illegal except under specific circumstances. In interviews with 
researchers, one gang member reported paying $50 for 10 bullets for a Beretta 
semi-automatic, roughly 50 times more expensive than store prices at the 
time. “You really don’t have someone who sells ammo around here,” another 
criminal said. “I mean it’s like you have to hope you can get it from [a 
gang] or maybe [a street dealer].”
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Another startling feature of the markets that supply criminals is how swiftly 
guns make their way from legal gun stores to crime scenes when they are not 
fettered by tougher laws. In one study conducted by Franklin Zimring, a UC 
Berkeley law professor, it was discovered that a large number of the guns 
seized in major metropolitan areas were sold by retail outlets relatively 
recently. Other studies have confirmed this point, finding that the many 
crime guns have a short “time-to-crime” (the time between when a gun is first 
bought and found at a crime scene), usually of a couple of months to a couple 
years.

The exception to this rule are guns used by gang members in areas with strict 
gun regulations — again including Chicago, where time-to-crime numbers ran to 
11.6 years as of 2013, the most recent data available. More than 60 percent 
of those guns were imported from outside Illinois, meaning that criminals 
looked to states with weaker gun laws to obtain their weaponry.

In fact, time-to-crime is often used as a proxy in gun violence research to 
measure the effectiveness of gun laws in limiting the diversion of firearms 
to criminals. If guns used for illegal purposes in Chicago consistently have 
a longer time-to-crime than guns in other cities, then that can be taken as 
evidence that Chicago’s gun laws are obstructing criminal activity. A 2014 
study by criminologist Glenn Pierce at Northeastern University found that 
California, with its strict legal and regulatory regime governing firearms, 
also produces crime guns with a much longer time-to-crime than other states. 
These numbers were confirmed by a recently issued ATF report, which found in 
2014 that California, a state with strict gun laws, had an average time-to-
crime of 13.52 years, versus a state with lax gun laws like Arizona, which 
had an average of 8.86 years.

A recent survey conducted by Cook and several colleagues interviewed 99 
prison inmates with gun related offenses in Chicago, and found that very few 
respondents bought their gun directly from a federally licensed gun dealer. 
Instead, most relied on a network of family and friends to obtain their 
weaponry. Pro-gun media and the NRA quickly pounced on the survey, claiming 
this was proof that criminals don’t follow laws and will be able to obtain 
firearms no matter what restrictions are implemented. Actually, the survey 
points in the opposite direction, indicating that regulations that produce 
higher prices for guns and ammunition in the black market can have a 
significant impact on criminal activity in the aggregate.

The interviews by the Cook team reveal that gun regulations have forced 
Chicago’s criminals (particularly gang members) to search for out of state 
sources and create an elaborate network of personal contacts to transfer 
guns, out of fear of being caught by police. As one respondent stated: “Most 
people either go to the down-South states or go to Indiana” — where gun laws 
are looser than Chicago’s and Illinois’ — “to get guns, or people obtain gun 
licenses, go to the store and then resell.” Another respondent further 
expounded on the difficulties of obtaining firearms: “A lot of guys in the 
‘hood’ don’t have access — a lot of networking stuff going on.” These 
findings paired with time-to-crime data demonstrate that Chicago’s gun laws 
are influencing the behavior of criminals and imposing greater transaction 
burdens on the illicit market. Gun violence continues to rock the city, but 
it’s fueled by the supply of guns from lightly regulated markets that 
undermine local barriers.

As Cook tells The Trace, if guns and ammunition “were more readily available 
in Chicago, and more of the dangerous youths had ready access at low prices, 
I’m convinced that there would be even more shootings.”
Why Background Checks Work

Further research has revealed background checks in particular are effective 
at keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and saving lives.

Before the Brady Act was passed in 1993, 32 states had no background check 
requirements of their own, making it easy for criminals to obtain firearms 
through licensed retailers. One obvious way we can be sure the law removed a 
previously attractive avenue for criminals to obtain guns is to note that 
criminals continued trying to secure firearms from federally licensed 
retailers after background checks came online. Following the passage of the 
Brady Act, Georgia saw 9.4 percent of its firearm applications by prohibited 
persons in 1996, and several other states recorded denial rates around 4 
percent. Each of those rejected purchases represents a dangerous person who 
would have easily been able to easily buy a gun before the background check 
system went into effect.

According to the most recent report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics 
(BJS), between 1994 and 2012 a total of 2,431,000 federal firearm 
applications, or 1.6 percent, have been denied as a consequence of the Brady 
Act. Breaking down that total, 1,105,000 of the applications were denied 
because the applicant had a felony indictment or conviction; 314,000 because 
of the applicant’s criminal history of domestic violence; and 145,000 due to 
the applicant’s status as a fugitive from justice.

Some of those prohibited purchasers are arrested on the spot — cases in which 
the effect of gun laws is nearly instant. In 2009, for example, the Virginia 
Firearms Transaction Program was used to follow up on the 2,777 attempted 
purchasers in Virginia who failed a background check. Of those, 856 were 
eventually arrested for criminal activity. (The mere act of lying on a 
background check form constitutes a felony charge with a penalty of “up to 10 
years imprisonment and/or up to a 250,000 fine.”) The Virginia program is so 
effective, purchasers are often arrested while they are still located inside 
the store. The Brady Campaign highlights a particularly salient story:

“On Thursday, October 23, 2008, Barry Cleveland Roberts went into a Norfolk, 
Virginia gun shop and filled out paperwork to purchase a 9 mm semi-automatic 
handgun. Roberts then left the store. When the FFL processed Roberts’ 
background check, it revealed he was wanted on a first-degree murder charge 
for an October 12 shooting death in Baltimore, Maryland. The dealer, in 
coordination with law enforcement, called Roberts to let him know he could 
return to the store and pick up his handgun. When Roberts arrived, police 
arrested him.”

But the clearest indication that background checks deter criminals from 
obtaining firearms comes from empirical evaluations of changes to those 
statutes. The important question is whether such policies are followed by 
decreases in gun use related to crime — any dip at all would be inconsistent 
with the notion that “criminals don’t follow laws.”

The strongest and most recent evidence on the efficacy of background checks 
thwarting criminals comes from two studies conducted by Dr. Daniel Webster at 
the Center for Gun Policy at Johns Hopkins University, which show the 
effectiveness of so called “permit to purchase” laws on reducing criminal 
access to firearms. The first study evaluated the repeal of a 2007 Missouri 
law that had required showing a permit, contingent on passing a background 
check, prior to obtaining a firearm. The repeal of this law was associated 
with a spike in the murder rate by 14 percent through 2012 — “an additional 
49 to 68 murders per year.” Furthermore, the study found strong evidence that 
the permit requirement had also been keeping neighboring states safe from gun 
trafficking. After its repeal, crime guns found in neighboring states traced 
back to Missouri increased significantly.

The second study examined a similar permit requirement passed in Connecticut 
in 1995. It looked at homicide rates in Connecticut ten years after the 
passage of the law, and compared that rate with what would be expected had 
Connecticut not passed the law at all. The study found a 40 percent reduction 
in the state’s firearm-related homicide rate. Just as importantly, 
Connecticut did not experience a concomitant increase in homicide by other 
means — in other words, criminals did not switch to using some other weapon 
to commit murder when they failed to get their hands on a firearm. Gun 
advocates often dismiss the potential of any gun law, arguing that killers 
will just kill some other way — that is, if a criminal is sufficiently 
motivated to carry out a homicide, he’s going to do it irrespective of 
whether or not he has access to a gun. The study proves that this so-called 
“substitution effect” doesn’t occur.
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Numerous individual-level studies also demonstrate the potential for robust 
background checks to decrease crime by denying criminals access to firearms. 
The earliest study on this question, conducted by Dr. Garen Wintemute in 
1999, tracked 177 people who were denied access to a firearm through a 
background check based on their felony record. These individuals were 
compared with a group of 2,470 individuals who had records with felony 
arrests but — because they were ultimately convicted for a lesser misdemeanor 
— passed their background checks. These individuals were tracked over the 
course of three years.

Even after controlling for potential differences between the two groups 
including age, prior criminal history, and so on, the study found that the 
group who had felony arrests but misdemeanor convictions (and were therefore 
approved through a background check) were two to four times more likely of 
later getting arrested for offenses related to violence or firearms compared 
to the group who was denied a gun. This finding indicates that the second 
group did not attempt, or at least successfully attempt, to obtain firearms 
through an alternative source. The study concludes that the “denial of 
handgun purchase is associated with a reduction in risk for later criminal 
activity of approximately 20 percent to 30 percent.”

Another study in California exploited a natural experiment and came to the 
same conclusion. In 1991, California passed a law that expanded firearm 
denial criteria to include persons convicted of violent misdemeanors. The 
study examined two groups of individuals ages 21-34, a sample of more than 
1,700 people. The first group was comprised of persons who attempted to 
obtain a firearm in 1991, but who were denied because of their violent 
misdemeanant status. The second group consisted of individuals with violent 
misdemeanors who successfully passed a background check to purchase a firearm 
between 1989 and 1990, before the passage of California’s new restrictions. 
Controlling for various social characteristics, the study found the 
individuals in the group whose purchases were approved were more likely than 
the those in the first group to later commit firearm-related or violent 
crimes.

The only coherent interpretation of all of these studies is that when a well-
designed gun policy effectively decreases dangerous people’s access to 
firearms, it also decreases crime. To put it more plainly: the laws work. If 
it was simply the case that criminals don’t follow laws, and that they would 
find some way to commit a crime irrespective of the legal obstacles in front 
of them, then there should be no difference between any of the groups 
examined in the studies above.
How Deliberate Loopholes Hamper Regulation

Not only is there very little empirical evidence to support the notion that 
“criminals don’t follow laws,” but the soundbite is intellectually incoherent 
at its face. The fact that criminals, by their very definition, don’t follow 
some laws is not a sufficient reason for eliminating all laws.

For example, if we were to apply the gun lobby’s reasoning on firearms to red 
lights and stop signs, we would have to conclude that traffic laws are an 
exercise in futility. After all, hardened criminals aren’t deterred by the 
threat of punishment, and so any traffic regulations can only hinder 
responsible, law-abiding car owners from moving swiftly from point A to point 
B.

Fortunately, United States traffic laws are relatively strict and well 
enforced. It is difficult, for example, to circumvent a high-speed camera 
while running a red light. It is for precisely this reason that there are no 
vocal opponents of traffic safety legislation decrying the use of stop signs 
and red lights because “criminals don’t follow laws.” In fact, if there is 
any sense in which it is true that “criminals don’t follow laws,” it is only 
because our nation’s gun laws are easily circumvented by design.

What’s worse, these loopholes are not mere accidents or byproducts of 
oversight. The very weaknesses that prevent federal gun policy from 
identifying and denying firearms to criminals are, in fact, products of a 
coordinated lobbying effort to render many gun policies powerless.

Take just one example: In 2003, Congress passed a series of laws backed by 
the NRA, collectively referred to as the “Tiahrt amendments,” that gave 
private gun retailers with broad immunity from the legal repercussions of 
selling guns that almost immediately find their way into criminal hands. The 
case of a Milwaukee firearms shop called Badger Guns and Ammo vividly 
illustrates the impact the change had on gun violence.

Years before the passage of Tiahrt, Badger was responsible for the majority 
of Milwaukee’s crime guns. Then, following pressure from a 1999 investigation 
by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), the shop changed its 
practices to eliminate the sale of low-quality, inexpensive handguns. This 
move alone was associated with a 73 percent reduction in crime guns sold by 
the dealer, and a 44 percent overall reduction in the flow of crime guns 
recovered in Milwaukee. By any measure, the ATF probe resulted in meaningful 
progress in the fight against gun trafficking.

After the Tiahrt amendments were passed, shielding the shop from any legal 
repercussions caused by selling crime guns, Badger reverted to its old ways. 
In the ensuing years, there was a 203 percent increase in guns diverted to 
criminals from the shop, effectively reversing any progress made by the ATF.
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Probably the most glaring loophole carved out by the gun lobby, however, is 
the virtually unregulated market of private transfers. The NRA was first able 
to successfully stall and eventually kill an attempt at expanded background 
checks in the aftermath of the 1999 mass shooting in Columbine, Colorado. The 
NRA replicated this feat in wake of the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, 
defeating a universal background check measure with overwhelming public 
support. (You can read more about this saga here.) However, despite the NRA’s 
protestations that these measures will accomplish little, the evidence 
clearly demonstrates that it’s this loophole through which many criminals 
obtain their firearms. One study that looked at criminal offenders legally 
prohibited from owning firearms found that 96 percent had obtained their 
firearms from sources that don’t conduct background checks, which includes 
all aspects of the gray market, from legitimate private sales to illegal 
transactions.

Unlike FFL dealers, private sellers are under no obligation to perform a 
background check, and in many states they don’t have the capability to 
conduct one. And unless the seller provably knows that the buyer is 
prohibited, there is no penalty for selling to a felon. This don’t ask, don’t 
tell system makes it especially easy for criminals to obtain firearms. 
Further, undercover investigations have repeatedly demonstrated that reliance 
on discretion and one’s moral scruples, in the absence of regulation, is not 
sufficient to stop many of the people selling guns on these marketplaces from 
doing business with prohibited buyers. One 2011 report from New York City 
found that more than 60 percent of sellers agreed to sell a firearm to an 
undercover buyer who stated he wouldn’t be able to pass a background check. 
Another 2013 report by Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG) estimated that 
potentially more than 25,000 firearms were transferred to prohibited buyers 
through Armlist.com in a single year alone. (MAIG is an early iteration of 
Everytown For Gun Safety, a seed donor to The Trace.)
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Building a roadblock like the background check system works, but its 
effectiveness is mitigated by the private sales loophole that creates a 
separate highway for criminals to obtain firearms. Indeed, one study by Cook 
and Ludwig, which failed to find a reduction in homicide rates after the 
passage of the Brady Act despite the law’s blocking of millions of sales to 
dangerous people, explicitly added the following cautionary note: “Some may 
argue that the regulation of gun acquisitions is futile. A more likely 
explanation for why the Brady Act did not do more to reduce gun homicide is 
that the act exempts the 30 percent to 40 percent of all gun sales each year 
that do not involve a licensed dealer.”

So the problem isn’t simply that our gun laws are too weak, or that criminals 
don’t follow them. The issue is that the very laws meant to curb gun violence 
are ultimately hamstrung in such a way that allows more people to have access 
to more guns. The result: more gun violence.