Mandatory Penalties for Unlawful Carrying of Guns
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Mandatory sentencing laws, which require a mandatory penalty for
unlicensed or otherwise unlawful carrying of a firearm, seek to reduce gun
use in unpremeditated crimes by deterring the casual carrying of firearms in
public places. The best known example of laws that institute a mandatory
penalty for unlawful carrying is the Massachusetts Bartley-Fox gun law.
The Massachusetts legislature enacted the Bartley-Fox gun law, which
mandated a one-year minimum prison term for the unlicensed carrying of
firearms and a two-year sentence for crimes committed while possessing a
gun, to reduce the incidence of firearm-related crime as well as the illicit
carrying of firearms (Beha, 1977). The amendment was adopted in July
1974 and became effective beginning in April 1975. Two months prior to
the law’s effective date, a concerted campaign was launched to characterize
the impending consequences in the following terms, “If you are caught with
a gun, you will go to prison for a year and nobody can get you out” (Pierce
and Bowers, 1981:122).
While the mandatory sentence provision removed most judicial discretion
in sentencing a defendant convicted of illegally carrying a gun, the
defendant could in fact escape the 1-year sentence in a variety of ways
(Deutsch and Alt, 1977). If someone was apprehended with a firearm on his
person, the police could file a charge of illegal possession, which does not
carry a mandatory minimum, rather than a charge of illegal carrying. Later
in the process, prosecutors could also press for the lesser possession charge
regardless of the initial police charge. Judges and juries could also find the
defendant guilty of a lesser charge. As Zimring commented, “the one-year
minimum will only invoke mandatory one-year jail terms for carrying without
a license to the extent that police, prosecutors, and judges want it to
produce such results. If there is strong resistance from any single link in this
chain, the mandatory minimum can be avoided” (as quoted in Deutsch and
Alt, 1977:545).
A series of studies examined the impact of the Bartley-Fox law on gun
crime and the administration of justice in Boston. Beha (1977) examined
the daily application of the Bartley-Fox law by police, prosecutors, and
judges through simple before-after analyses of prosecutions for firearms
violations and firearm-related crimes in Boston between 1974 and 1975.
He analyzed two 6-month samples of all complaints relating to the illegal
use, possession, or carrying of a firearm for 1974 and 1975 drawn from the
dockets of Boston district courts and cross-checked against Boston Police
Department records.
His analysis suggests that Bartley-Fox made it more likely for a prison
sentence to be imposed in both firearm assault prosecutions and cases in
which illegal carrying was the most serious charge, but the law did not
affect the disposition of prosecutions for armed robbery and homicide.
Beha (1977) also found that criminal justice officials did not systematically
attempt to evade the mandatory sentence. In an analysis of yearly issuances
of firearms identification cards and licenses to carry firearms between 1970
and 1975, Beha reported that the high degree of publicity attendant on the
amendment’s passage, some of which was inaccurate, increased citizen compliance
with existing legal stipulations surrounding firearm acquisition and
possession, some of which were not in fact addressed by the amendment.
Using simple before-after analyses of percentage changes in reported crime
rates between 1970 and early 1977, Beha notes that the law did not seem to
affect armed robbery but produced definite reductions in firearm-related
assaults and firearm-related assault-homicides. However, the total number
of aggravated assaults remained constant over time, suggesting a shift from
guns to less lethal weapons.
Other studies suggest that criminal justice practitioners may have hindered
the implementation of the Bartley-Fox law. In interviews with Boston
police officers, Carlson (1982) found that 89 percent of the officers interviewed
reported becoming more selective about whom to frisk for weapons,
as they did not want to arrest someone who was otherwise a lawabiding
citizen. The National Institute of Justice also reports that, between
1974 and 1976, arrests in gun incidents decreased by 23 percent, while
weapons seizures without arrest increased by 120 percent. While it is unclear
whether the number of guns seized without arrest increased in tandem
with all weapons seizures, these figures suggest that police may have made
fewer gun-carrying arrests to evade the law.
Rossman et al. (1980) found that Bartley-Fox impeded the flow of
cases through the criminal justice system, as defendants had no incentive to
plead guilty. They found that the rate at which gun-carrying cases went to
trial tripled, the conviction rate was halved, and the median time to disposition
doubled. Dismissals and not-guilty verdicts doubled, suggesting that
judges may have been avoiding the imposition of the mandatory sentence
for some defendants. Rossman and his colleagues (1980) also found that,
while a smaller fraction of gun-carrying defendants were convicted of felony
gun-carrying, the fraction that received prison sentences did increase. These
shifts in case processing and the discretionary actions of criminal justice
practitioners in Massachusetts are common responses to the adoption of
mandatory sentences (see, e.g., Alschuler, 1978).
Pierce and Bowers (1981) used interrupted-time-series techniques and
multiple control group comparisons to examine the impact of Bartley-Fox
on firearm-related and nonfirearm-related assaults, robbery, and homicide
in Boston. They found a statistically significant reduction in gun
assaults in March 1975, one month prior to the implementation of the
Bartley-Fox law. The authors suggest that the vigorous publicity campaign
influenced behavior before the law actually went into effect. The
multiple control group comparison consisted of simple percentage change
analyses of firearm-related crime rates in 1974 and 1975 for Boston relative
to other New England cities, the United States without Massachusetts,
the middle Atlantic states, the north central states, and selected
cities within a 750-mile radius, including Washington, DC, Baltimore,
New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Detroit. Pierce and Bowers
(1981) found that the law significantly reduced firearm-related assaults,
but produced offsetting increases in nonfirearm-related armed assaults;
there was some reduction in firearm-related robberies accompanied by a
lesser increase in nonfirearm-related armed robberies; and firearm-related
homicides were reduced with no increase in nonfirearm-related homicides.
They conclude that the law, in the short term, may have deterred
some individuals from carrying or using their firearms, but it did not
prevent them from substituting alternative weapons.
Using similar methods, Deutsch and Alt (1977) analyzed police reports
of firearm-related assaults, homicide (all types), and armed robbery (including
other weapons) for the time period January 1966 through October
1975. The evaluation was designed to detect short-term impacts of the law,
as it only included a six-month horizon after the enactment of the law.
Deutsch and Alt found a statistically significant 18 percent decrease in gun
assaults and a statistically significant 20 percent decrease in armed robberies,
but no statistically significant changes in homicide incidents. Hay and
McCleary (1979) reanalyzed Deutsch and Alt’s data and suggest that the
stochastic components of the time series were not specified correctly and
the postintervention time series was too short to permit an accurate specification
of the intervention component. Hay and McCleary suggest that the
Deutsch and Alt findings are inconclusive. In a rejoinder, Deutsch (1979)
critiques the ARIMA model specification choices made by Hay and
McCleary in their reanalysis and comments that their research was
“wrought with inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and half truths” (p. 327).
In their analysis of the Deutsch and Alt data, Berk and his colleagues
(1979) conclude that the law reduced armed robbery, had mixed effects on
firearm-related assaults, and had no effects on homicides. In his later analysis,
Deutsch (1981) expanded the time series through September 1977 and
found that the Bartley-Fox law produced significant reductions in homicide,
firearm-related assaults, and armed robbery. The broader methodological
lesson learned from this exchange was that identifying appropriate
models for evaluation purposes can be a very subjective exercise. As Kleck
(1997) suggests, “Experts in [time series] modeling also commonly point
out difficulties that even experienced practitioners have in specifying time
series models. Specification is very much an art rather than a science, so
that different researchers, using the same body of data, can make substantially
different, even arbitrary, specification decisions, and, as a result, obtain
sharply different results” (p. 354).
Indeed, with such dissimilar findings, it is difficult to specify the effects
of the Bartley-Fox law on firearm-related crime. Collectively, this body of
research seems to suggest a broad impact on gun crime in Boston. However,
it is unclear whether the firearms sentencing enhancement or the mandatory
sentence for illegal gun-carrying generated the impact. Kleck (1991)
observes that, if one accepts that the Bartley-Fox law worked as a whole, it
is risky to infer that other gun-carrying laws would also work, since it may
have been a unique constellation of factors in the Boston setting that was
responsible for the effect.
Conclusion
Punishment enhancements for firearm-related crimes seem to be justified
in sentencing by seriousness considerations, since firearms use in violent
crimes increases the likelihood of the victim’s death (Cook and Nagin,
1979). Moreover, there is some evidence to suggest that there should be an
incapacitation effect, since gun offenders usually persist in their choice of
using a firearm in subsequent crimes (Cook and Nagin, 1979). However,
the available research evidence on the deterrent effects of firearms sentencing
enhancements on firearm-related crime is mixed, with city-level studies
suggesting reductions in firearm-related homicides and possibly other types
of firearm-related crime in urban settings (McDowall et al., 1992), as well
as nationwide studies suggesting no crime prevention effects at the state
level (Marvell and Moody, 1995).
The committee recommends more rigorous study of firearms sentencing
enhancement laws at the city level. As Kleck (1997) suggests, state-level
analyses suffer from aggregation bias, and lumping heterogeneous jurisdictions
into one area could conceal potentially important causal effects at
lower levels of aggregation. City-level studies need to engage more rigorous
methods, such as pooled time-series, cross-sectional studies that allow the
detection of short-term impacts while controlling for variation in violence
levels both across different areas and different times.