The US firearms market is the world’s largest free market for firearms.
The United States suffers from the highest rates of gun violence in the high-income world.
With an average of over 14,500 firearms homicides per year in 2017, the U.S. has a rate of gun homicide 4.5 per 100,000 people per year — over 13 times that of Canada (National Center for Health Statistics, 2018).
Informed fundamentally by the Second Amendment, which guarantees the right of citizens to keep and bear arms, the United States also has some of the laxest laws on gun sales globally.
The result is the world’s largest free market for firearms.
In 2017, there were:
The Small Arms Survey estimates that the US has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world (at 120.5 firearms per 100 people).
This is more than double the rate of war-torn Yemen (52.8) and thrice that of post-war Serbia and Montenegro (both at 39.1) (Karp, 2018).
A functional characterization of firearms markets is prerequisite to making informed policy decisions designed to reduce gun violence.
Despite its large size and prominent role in early American industrialization (Brauer, Montolio, & Trujillo-Baute, 2017, footnote 2), the US firearms market remains largely uncharacterized from the point of view of economic analysis.
One key limitation is data (Muggah & McDougal, 2014).
Figure 1. Annual domestic firearms production, export, and imports (secondary y-axis) and BLS price index (primary y-axis) by year.
Competition from imported firearms spurred technological upgrading in domestic U.S. firms.
Figure 2 shows that price indices of imported handguns and domestic handguns converged over the 1990s, suggesting that the price gap between the two indices is representative of a corresponding technology gap.
Figure 2. Imported (red) and domestic (green) handgun prices indices by year, plotted along with the overall inflation-adjusted BLS firearms price index (blue). 2012 = 100.
The data permitted us to model firearms supply and demand as a function of demographic, economic, political, and legal predictors, all instrumented by exogenous variables quantifying the impacts of natural disasters.
Our results broadly paint a portrait of a normal industry, with a predictably upward-sloping supply curve and a satisfyingly downward-sloping demand curve.
However, that was not all. We also found a number of striking peculiarities about the US firearms market.
Levels of existing stocks are positively associated with demand. For every 1% rise in civilian firearm stocks, firearms quantity demanded rises by 1.29%.
This finding may accord with the hypothesis that, by eroding property security more generally in society, firearms create their own demand. Indeed, violent crimes, including murders and mass shootings, drive demand for firearms up.
Such a finding is in agreement with theoretical models of conflict in the absence of property security (Caruso, 2010), as well as empirical studies of the effects of collective insecurity on firearms demand (McDowall & Loftin, 1983).
The finding specific to mass shootings also accords with recent work suggesting that these events drive up prices, and have traditionally driven down firearms manufacturers’ stock prices – until a post-2010 “new normal” emerged (Gopal & Greenwood, 2017; Jones & Stone, 2015).
These findings suggest an economic justification for legal restrictions on the sales of firearms paralleling those on sales of harmful and addictive drugs, and for gun buyback programs and small arms destruction programs.
The number of firearms laws is actually positively correlated to gun sales.
Far from dampening overall sales volumes of firearms, gun legislation may make legal purchase and ownership clearer and easier. On the other hand, it may do little besides stoke fears of impending firearms shortages.
The major exception to this rule is the U.S. Federal Assault Weapons Ban (FAWB), signed into law in 1994 by then-President Clinton and allowed to expire 10 years later by then-President Bush, which we credit econometrically with a 0.45% drop in domestic firearms production for U.S. markets.
These findings may corroborate both claims that gun legislation largely has no significant effect on gun sales (Polsby, 1994). Further, observations of the FAWB did in fact reduce the availability of weapons on the market (Koper & Roth, 2002).
This result may imply that firearms legislation only curbs volumes on the market when it involves an outright ban on some category of weapon. It may also imply that the gun lobby need not be concerned by the prospect of common-sense gun safety legislation.
In terms of U.S. exports, we find that U.S. military campaigns abroad have a positive effect on quantity supplied. In addition, the number of U.S. military veterans is correlated with quantity demanded abroad.
These predictors are not significant in the case of domestically-sold firearms.
This suggests that the US military plays a role in enhancing the capacity of US firearms firms to compete or enter markets abroad. Or in the destabilization of countries that then become markets for US firearms manufacturers.
In summary, our study (currently under peer review) moves towards illuminating a market that has long resisted characterization.
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