Supply
17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33
34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50
51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67
68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84
85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101
102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115
The factors affecting the supply of firearms to offenders are comparably
numerous. Guns used in crimes (crime guns) are obtained both from the
existing stock in private hands (purchase in secondhand markets, theft,
gifts) and from new production (sales by and thefts from FFLs, wholesalers,
or manufacturers). In the aggregate these sources can be thought of as
constituting a supply system; a higher money price will generate more guns
for sale to high-risk individuals. Supply side interventions aim to shift the
supply curve up, so that fewer guns are available at any given money price.
It may be useful to conceptualize each supply curve as independently
determined. The factors that affect the costs of providing firearms through
thefts (whether from households or stores) are likely to be distinct from
those affecting provision of the same weapons through straw purchases.
Raising penalties for stealing guns or expanding the burglary squad will
raise the risk compensation (i.e., price) needed to induce burglars to undertake
a given volume of gun theft. Those same measures are unlikely to have
much effect on the risks faced in straw purchase transactions, which will be
raised for example by tougher enforcement of FFL record-keeping requirements.
While we will refer to a single supply curve for firearms to offenders,
it is the sum of a number of components.
Markets may also be places; that is the guiding principle of much
antidrug policing, since there are specific locations at which many sales
occur on a continuing basis. It is unclear whether places are important for
gun acquisition. Gun purchases are very rare events when compared with
drug purchases; a few per year versus a few per week for those most active
in the market (Koper and Reuter, 1996). The low frequency of gun purchases
has two opposing effects. On one hand, it reduces the attraction to a
seller of being in a specific place, since there will be a long period with no
purchases but with potential police attention. On the other hand, buyers
are less likely to be well informed because of the low rate of purchase and
may be willing to pay a substantial price premium to obtain a gun more
rapidly, thus increasing the value of operating in a location that is known to
be rich in firearms acquisition opportunities.
Gun shows are potential specific places where criminals acquire guns.
Gun shows may be especially attractive venues for the illegal diversion of
firearms due to the large number of shows per year, the size of the shows,
the large volume of transactions, and the advertising and promotion of
these events. Gun shows provide a venue for large numbers of secondary
market sales by unlicensed dealers; they are exempted from the federal
transaction requirements that apply to licensed dealers who also are vendors
at these events. The Police Foundation (1996) estimated, from the
National Survey of Private Gun Ownership, that gun shows were the place
of acquisition of 3.9 percent of all guns and 4.5 percent of handguns. The
1991 BJS survey of state prison inmates suggests that less than 1 percent of
handgun using inmates personally acquired their firearm at a gun show
(Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1993). However, these data did not determine
whether a friend, family member, or street dealer purchased the gun for the
inmate at a gun show. While it is not known what proportion of crime guns
come from gun shows or what proportion of gun show dealers act criminally,
research suggests that criminals do illegally acquire guns at these
venues through unlicensed dealers, corrupt licensed dealers, and straw purchasers
(Braga and Kennedy, 2000). Certain states specifically regulate
firearms sales at gun shows; otherwise, there have been no systematic attempts
to implement place-based interventions to disrupt illegal transactions
at gun shows.
Note that the market is partly a metaphor. For example, many guns are
acquired through nonmarket activities, gifts or loans from friends with no
expectation of a specific payment in return. These may take place “in the
shadow” of the market, so that the terms are influenced by the costs of
acquiring guns in formal transactions; when guns are more expensive to
acquire in the market, owners are more reluctant to lend them. However
there is no empirical basis for assessing how close these links are. An
additional complication is that guns are highly differentiated and there is no
single price. No agency or researcher has systematically collected price data
over a sufficient length of time to determine the correlation of prices across
gun types over time and thus whether they are appropriately treated as a
single market or even a set of linked markets.
Using the Framework
One value of this approach (demand, supply, and substitution) is in
developing intermediate measures of whether an intervention might influence
the desired outcome. For example, intensified police enforcement
against sellers in the informal market (through “buy-and-bust” stings),
even though affecting the firearms market for offenders, may not be a large
enough intervention to produce detectable changes in the levels of either
violent crimes or violent crimes with firearms, given the noisiness of these
time series and lags in final effects. However, if this enforcement has not
affected the money price or the difficulty of acquisition in the secondary
market, then it almost certainly has not had the intended effects; thus a cost
measure provides a one-sided test. The ADAM (Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring)
data system provided a potential source of such data at the local
level.
Table 4-3 presents a list of hypothesized effects of the major interventions
discussed in this chapter. This is more in the nature of a heuristic than
a precise classification or prediction. It distinguishes between the two classes
of markets and the two forms of acquisition cost (monetary and nonmonetary)
in each market. Note again that the principal market for offenders is
conceptualized as illegal diversions from retail outlets, such as convicted
felons personally lying and buying or using false identification to acquire
guns, straw purchasers illegally diverting legally purchased guns, and corrupt
licensed dealers falsifying transaction paperwork or making off-thebook
sales. The secondary market includes all other informal firearms transfers,
such as direct theft, purchases of stolen guns from others, loans or gifts
from friends and families, and unregulated sales among private sellers.
TABLE 4-3 Intermediate Effects of Market Interventions
Outcomes
Primary Market for Offenders Secondary Market for Offenders
Acquisition Acquisition
Price Difficulty Price Difficulty
Intervention
Regulating + +
federal firearms
licensees
Limiting gun + +
sales
Screening gun +
buyers
Buy-back +
programs
Sell and bust – +
Buy and bust + +
NOTE: In cells with no entry, we assume no discernible effect.