Civilian (household) gun ownership levels continue rise along with efforts to regulate gun ownership and possession. Scholarly efforts in this space, while increasing, confront complex data, modeling, and research design challenges.
In Preferences for Firearms and Their Implications for Regulation, the authors, Sarah Moshary (UC Berkeley—Business) et al., steer clear of trying to identify causal links between gun ownership and crime or gun deaths. Instead, the paper "estimates the effects of policy on both the number and types of guns sold in the primary market, as well as the consumer surplus that accrues to gun owners from their purchases.”
Among the various policy counterfactual simulations that the paper explores include a policy that bans assault weapons. What the paper's findings imply is a consumer shift from assault weapon ownership to firearm ownership. This is so, the paper argues, because even though consumers who are in the market for handguns do not consider long guns at all, many consumers that consider purchasing a long gun, by contrast, "are also interested in buying a handgun." As the "vast majority" of gun violence involves handguns, however, this substitution effect, fueled by a regulatory ban, introduces complicating policy wrinkles. The paper's abstract follows.
“This paper estimates consumer demand for firearms with the aim of evaluating the likely impacts of firearm regulations. We first conduct a stated-choice-based conjoint analysis and estimate an individual-level demand model for firearms. We validate our estimates using aggregate moments from observational data. Next, we use our estimates to simulate changes in the number and types of guns in circulation under alternative regulations. Importantly, we find that bans or restrictions that specifically target ‘assault weapons’ increase demand for handguns, which are associated with the vast majority of firearm-related violence. We provide distributions of consumer surplus under counterfactuals and discuss how those distributions could be useful for crafting policy."
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