To Reduce US Gun Sales, Limit Access to Handguns

Whenever a mass shooting in America is shocking enough to take over the headlines, calls go up to bring back the ban on assault weapons, a loose category that generally includes semiautomatic rifles and shotguns. But would that reduce the overall number of guns in circulation, given that around a third of US households surveyed in 2021 reported having a gun in the home?

Probably not, according to research by University of California at Berkeley’s Sarah Moshary, Chicago Booth’s Bradley Shapiro, and Booth research professional Sara Drango. Using a survey of 22,500 Americans, including 4,000 gun owners and buyers, the researchers constructed an analytical framework for evaluating firearms policy options. They find that customer substitution would blunt the intended effects of many popular regulations. In particular, the proposed “assault-weapons ban” would induce gun enthusiasts to buy more handguns instead, a category of weapon that is statistically more likely to be involved in crime.

Restricting handgun access would be hugely challenging—like any form of gun control—in the face of the ferocious promotion of the Second Amendment right to bear arms. More than 40 percent of American households own at least one gun, and over 5 percent have 10 firearms or more, the researchers find. At the same time, the United States has some 45,000 firearms-related fatalities every year. The researchers’ results confirm that restricting access would be difficult in part because customers prize their guns and despite the safety concerns, consider them to be worth far more than they paid for them.

The researchers worked with the Harris Poll, a global market-research and consulting firm, to conduct their study, using a quantitative marketing tool known as stated-choice-based conjoint analysis. They presented a series of questions on firearms, and manipulated prices and choices to assess how respondents would trade off different attributes.

There is no comprehensive federal database on gun sales and pricing, as the government is legally barred from collecting such information. Moshary, Shapiro, and Drango built their own database by scraping prices from galleryofguns.com, which provides information on gun costs and retail locations. Their data cover 520 zip codes.

In 2020, Americans bought 37 million guns, the researchers estimate. According to their model, 65 percent of gun purchases were handguns, which comprise one of the two main categories of firearms, the other being long guns. Handguns, which users can shoot using only their hands, generally include semiautomatic pistols and revolvers. Long guns, which are fired from the shoulder, include rifles and shotguns.

The researchers use the phrase “assault weapons” to describe all semiautomatic rifles and shotguns, recognizing that “the label obscures some nuance, as ‘assault weapon’ is not really a defined category of firearm, per se. Features such as the length of the barrel and the size of the stock are often invoked in laws concerning ‘assault weapons,’ and some handguns can fall into this category, as well.”