Regulating gun markets.

• Author: Cook, Philip J.
• Position: Guns and Violence Symposium

1. INTRODUCTION

   With the rapid increase since the mid-1980s in rates of homicide and other criminal violence, crime has emerged as the nation's leading domestic problem. One tactic for mitigating lethal violence is gun control--government regulation of the production, exchange, and use of personal firearms. A number of proposals are currently being debated at the federal, state, and local levels. Recently, Congress enacted the Brady Bill and adopted a partial ban on assault weapons, while the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) toughened sales procedures for gun dealers.(1) A central issue in debating these and other control measures is which types of regulation are likely to be most cost-effective in reducing gun violence.

   This Article concerns the secondary gun market, one of the key issues in understanding the potential effectiveness of gun control measures. The primary objective of much of the gun control effort in the United States is to discourage certain categories of people, including felons and those under indictment, from obtaining and possessing guns, while preserving ready availability of guns for everyone else.(2) To this end, federal law bans mail order shipments to everyone except licensed dealers and requires licensed dealers to screen customers for eligibility.(3) However, dealers are not well-regulated and used guns can be readily purchased from other sources. Both of these issues undercut the discrimination strategy for reducing gun violence. Our research is concerned with developing a better understanding of gun markets, particularly the secondary, largely unregulated markets that supply youths and criminals with a large percentage of their guns. We seek to identify promising tactics by which regulatory and law enforcement agencies may better enforce the prohibition on purchase and possession by proscribed groups.

   This Article provides a summary of the existing literature on gun markets and presents a year-long data-collection effort to develop an empirical description of gun markets as they operate in the Triangle area of North Carolina.(4) We arranged meetings with local law enforcement officers, State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) personnel, BATF officers, and ten incarcerated delinquents to learn about local gun transactions.(5) To collect data on gun theft in the area, we surveyed law enforcement agencies, and, when necessary, visited the agencies to pull data directly from the original crime reports. We attended a gun show and observed the guns offered for sale and the characteristics of the transactions that occurred. We also collected newspaper accounts from across the country to help piece together a picture of gun markets.

   When we began, we expected that state and local law enforcement agencies and the local office of the BATF could provide us with information about illicit gun markets. However, we found that no agency investigates and disrupts the local gun markets that supply youths and criminals with guns. Even a small effort in this area would be a useful beginning.

   Section II of this Article provides background on gun ownership and gun use in crimes in the United States. Section III reviews the federal and state systems regulating the distribution of guns, pointing to major loopholes in these systems. Section IV details the distinction between the primary and secondary markets for firearms and discusses the linkages between them. Federally licensed firearm dealers are discussed in Section V, with examples of dealers who use their licenses to distribute guns illegally, together with an assessment of the prospects for improving the regulation of these dealers. Section VI focuses on theft as a source of guns for the illegal sector and on the redistribution of stolen guns; we also discuss possible interventions to reduce gun theft. Section VII details secondary firearm markets, where guns are bought and sold without the benefit of a licensed dealer or the paperwork that provides an official record of the transaction. Section VIII notes the extraordinary lack of intelligence data on the workings of the gun markets and suggests proposals for future research and regulation.

2. BACKGROUND: GUNS AND CRIME

   Violent crime emerged in the last few years as the most prominent domestic problem facing the nation. The homicide rate, which declined 23% between 1980 and 1985, climbed in 1991 almost to the 1980 level.(6) What is remarkable about this recent surge of violence is the extent to which it has been concentrated in a rather narrow segment of the population--youths in their teens and twenties, especially African-American, male youths.(7) Figures 1 and 2 depict these trends. The already high homicide victimization rate for African-American males age fifteen to twenty-four doubled in six years. Meanwhile, both African-Americans and whites over age thirty-five have experienced a continuing decline in homicide rates since 1980.(8)

   Developing a comprehensive explanation for these puzzling trends is beyond the scope of this Article. But several additional facts clarify these trends. First, most victims are killed by people who have similar demographic characteristics; and the demographic trends in homicide-arrest rates are similar to trends in victimization.9 Second, guns are used in two-thirds of criminal homicides, and over 80% of male homicide victims aged fifteen to twenty-four die of gunshot wounds. During the past twenty years, firearm homicides accounted for virtually all the rapid increase in the homicide rate for young, African-American males, as shown in Figure 3.

   Youths appear to have easy access to guns. Over half the respondents in one representative sample of students in grades seven through twelve said they could get a handgun if they wanted one, including 62% of the respondents who lived in central cities.(10) More remarkable is that 15% of these youths said they had carried a handgun on their person in the previous thirty days.(11) While there are no comparable statistics from earlier years, these results indicate that guns are now as prevalent in the cities as they have been in rural areas. The difference is that the cities have much higher rates of criminal violence.

   While the widespread availability of guns in urban areas is not a "root cause" of violent crime, it significantly adds to the deadliness of that violence.(12) Effective control over the distribution of guns would have little effect on the volume of assaults and robberies, but it would reduce the homicide rate.

   Guns are extremely durable, and some of the guns used in crime have been in the possession of the shooter for years or even decades. Effective regulation of guns already in private hands seems a difficult task. But on the basis of available evidence, we conclude that most guns used in crime, especially by youths, are not those that have been kept in the same dresser drawer for the last decade, but have been acquired relatively recently.(13) An effective transfer-regulating scheme that prevents guns from going to dangerous people would be nearly as successful as a much more intrusive scheme targeted at current gun owners.

   Each new cohort of violent criminals must obtain guns somewhere. Many delinquent youths are active in the gun market as both buyers and sellers, and they acquire guns by borrowing and stealing them.(14) While we have no systematic data on the average lag between acquisition of a gun and its use in a crime, logic suggests that the lag cannot be longer than a few months for youthful offenders, and it may be only a few weeks.

   In trying to understand gun markets and how they relate to criminal activity, it is useful to consider that guns have value in exchange as well as in use. For someone living a chaotic life without a regular address or source of income, a gun may serve as an important store of value that can be readily exchanged for other goods and services. A youth who purchases or steals a gun may hold on to it for a few weeks and then decide that he needs money--or drugs--more than a gun, at which point he will find a ready market among his peers. Alternatively, the gun may be stolen from him, or he may loan it to a friend and not replace it for a while. One interesting statistic from a survey of inner-city, male, high-school students indicates that over one quarter of respondents who had ever owned a gun (8% of the total) currently did not own one.(15)

   We interviewed ten boys with extensive records of criminal activity.(16) We asked about the number of guns they had prior to coming to the school. All had owned at least one, and seven had possessed more than ten guns during their brief criminal careers. Even so, several admitted there were times when they had been without a gun. One interviewee said, "I didn't have guns for awhile because I was chilling out. I didn't want anything to do with guns. I sold some, then gave some away to friends." Another said, "I didn't have a gun once for three months because I lent my gun to my cousin to use." They commented on the value of a gun in trade. One indicated, "When [people] are short on money they have no choice but to sell."(17) Comments by Interviewee 9 helped remind us that these were still just kids: "I've had about twenty guns. I traded a.22 for a Super Nintendo and some other guns for a VCR and for my waterbed. I got other stuff for my room, like a phone with lights and a copy [fax] machine for a twenty-gauge."(18)

   Regulating gun transfers appears to be a promising method of keeping guns from the hands of youths and criminals or, at least, of limiting the time that they are armed. When guns are relatively scarce and expensive, youths may be slower to acquire a gun and quicker to sell it.

3. BACKGROUND: REGULATING GUN TRANSFERS

   The government regulates the manufacture and distribution of guns to reduce gun violence and enacts and enforces these regulations under heavy influence from the traditional and arguably...