Gun Control: Cause & effect

A Smoking Gun from Down Under
Recent events have brought the heated debate about gun control to atomic levels in the United States. For some Americans, it seems of no question that we should limit or even ban an individual’s right to bear arms for the greater good of our nation. For others, the right to own a firearm is one of the fundamental liberties afforded the citizens of this country and to restrict that right intrudes on the very essence of being American.
The argument for limiting or banning firearms for individuals is based on the belief that it makes firearms less accessible to individuals wishing to do harm to themselves or others and therefore reduces the number of deaths caused by firearms. In order to assess the validity of this claim, we must seek out data from other countries that have instituted similar laws on gun control and analyze the effects on gun related deaths. While several countries have gun laws that limit or prohibit an individual’s right to own a gun, such as India, England, and Cambodia, these countries all have external factors that impact the effects and limits the accuracy of any data gathered. An example of these factors would be the geographic location of the country enabling a person to travel outside of the country or region to acquire firearms and return with them illegally.
However, Australia implemented the National Firearms Agreement (NFA) in 1996-97, which involved the buyback and destruction of over 600,000 guns within a few months. The NFA is one of the most massive government adjustments to gun control regulations in the developed world in recent history and there have been many studies on firearm related deaths in this country to measure the effects. While three studies of the same data provided results indicating that the NFA had a direct effect on decreasing gun related fatalities, a fourth study indicated that each of the prior results were flawed in their analysis. Two students from the Melbourne Institute for Applied Economics and Social Research at the University of Melbourne conducted a thorough analysis of the data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and determined that the NFA did not have any large effects on reducing firearm homicide or suicide rates.
In their published paper, Working Paper Number 17/08; The Australian Firearms Buyback and Its Effect on Gun Deaths, Wang-Sheng Lee and Sandy Suardi use tests for unknown structural breaks as a means to identifying impacts of the NFA. Focusing on gun related death rates, they discovered that there was a downward trend in both suicide and homicide rates starting from around about 1985 which could have masked any possible effect that the NFA might exert on both firearm suicide and firearm homicide rates. In contrast, they found that there was a coinciding increase in non-firearm suicide and non-firearm homicide rates beginning around about 1985 as well.
The prior studies used forecast errors as the method for identifying the treatment effect or compared slopes of the two regressions to test for significant differences. Lee and Suardi avoided the need to choose a particular date to define the pre- and post-periods allowing for possible announcement effects or lagged impacts of a dummy variable in place at the time the NFA went into effect to be evaluated.
Using a number of structural break tests and complex algorithms to assess the data from the ABS on both firearm related and non-firearm related deaths, they found little evidence to suggest that the NFA had any significant effects on firearm homicides or suicides. Any decreases in gun related deaths from previous studies were proven null hypothesis’ by the well-documented trend in firearm related death reductions that began in 1985, prior to the NFA.
Several features of the Australian gun buyback make it relevant when considering nationwide revisions to US policy on gun control. First, it has been contended that numerous gun laws in the U.S. have failed because they are local, allowing guns from contiguous countries (i.e. Canada and Mexico) or other states to “leak” into areas with stricter jurisdictions. Lee and Suardi recognize that, “Australia is geographically isolated with no domestic supply of the prohibited firearms, a nationwide implementation of the gun buyback implies that leakage would not be a serious issue.” This would indicate that the resulting effects in Australia would be a “clean” indicator as to how gun regulations affect gun related death rates. Also, the gun buyback program in Australia was much larger and better funded than comparable efforts in the US, helping to determine whether the size of the buyback matters. Lastly, Australia has a very similar gun culture to America and would be a better indicator of the effects of gun regulation in our country than other countries where homicide rates are lower by international standards such as England.
With little evidence that the NFA directly influenced the decrease of gun related deaths in Australia and the factors relating to our current situation in American, there is no substantiated evidence that implementing such regulations in the US would have the desired effect on gun death rates here. So while gun control legislation might appear to be a logical and sensible answer that helps to placate the public’s fears, the evidence suggests something far different. The expenditures necessary for such a vast enforcement would not be justified with tangible reductions in firearm deaths. Therefore, the idea that limiting or prohibiting an individual’s right to firearms would not directly result in a decrease in gun related deaths and is an ad hoc fallacy.