Major Shootings Led to Tougher Gun Laws, but to What End?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/us/politics/fact-check-mass-shootings-gun-laws.html

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WASHINGTON — Since last week’s deadly shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla., a pitched national conversation about gun policy has dominated town hall meetings, a White House summit meeting, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference and the never-ending stream of social media feeds.

Below is a brief review of several laws governing guns in the United States and how effective those policies have been in curbing violence.

Some of the toughest laws that regulate the production, distribution and use of firearms in the United States were passed after major acts of violence.

■ The National Firearms Act of 1934 was signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt after high-profile gangland crimes, including the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929 that killed seven in Chicago. The law imposed a $200 tax on transfers of machine guns, short-barrel rifles and shotguns, and it required gun owners to register those weapons.

At the time, the tax was “considered quite severe and adequate” to discourage or eliminate sales of those guns, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. It still stands at $200 — even though its current value, after adjusting for inflation, would come to about $3,700.

■ The Gun Control Act of 1968 was passed after the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. It banned interstate mail orders of all firearms, interstate handgun sales and weapons with no “sporting purpose.” It prohibited the sale of firearms to minors, felons, fugitives, drug addicts and those committed to a mental institution. And it required gun manufacturers and dealers to be licensed and maintain records of sales.

■ After an intense lobbying effort by gun advocates, the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act of 1986 lifted some of those restrictions. The 1986 law allowed dealers to sell rifles and shotguns through the mail, and it limited federal inspections of gun dealers. It also prohibited the sale of machine guns manufactured after May 19, 1986.

■ The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993 further amended the 1968 law: It required gun purchasers not already licensed to possess a firearm to undergo background checks when buying from sellers licensed by the federal government. However, private transactions were exempted, creating the so-called gun-show loophole.

■ The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 banned the possession, transfer or domestic manufacturing of some semiautomatic assault weapons for 10 years. Known as the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, it expired in 2004, despite efforts by gun control advocates to extend it.

■ In 2008, Congress passed the NICS Improvement Amendments Act after a shooting at Virginia Tech a year earlier had killed 33. The law created a series of incentives and systems — but not requirements — for states to share information with the federal government about people who have been disqualified from obtaining guns.

Eight states have enacted some kind of ban on assault weapons. Two other states regulate military-grade firearms. State gun laws are tracked, in detail, by the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which lobbies for gun control.

According to the law center, states with the strictest gun control measures have the lowest rates of gun-related deaths. Those states include California, Connecticut, New Jersey and New York. Conversely, states that do not aggressively regulate guns — like Alabama, Alaska and Louisiana — have the highest.

Still, as Lisa Foderaro and Kristin Hussey have reported for The New York Times, “Cities like Chicago and Baltimore, with rigorous gun laws, also have two of the highest murder rates in the country. The black market for illegal guns has thrived in those cities, with gang members and criminals turning to the streets to get firearms.”

Some state gun control laws have come under court review. In one prominent case, the Supreme Court limited gun control efforts in its 2009 ruling District of Columbia v. Heller.

Since then, however, the United States’ highest court has opted to not consider other Second Amendment cases, including in 2016, when it declined to hear challenges to bans on assault weapons in Connecticut and New York. Those state laws were passed after 20 first graders and six adults were killed in a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

In choosing to not hear those cases, “the justices have given at least tacit approval to broad gun control laws in states and localities that choose to enact them,” wrote Adam Liptak, the legal affairs correspondent for The Times.

It’s difficult to directly link declines in crime or gun violence to any specific law, given the limited scope and loopholes in each one, according to experts and research.

The National Rifle Association has “successfully built in ineffectiveness” to gun control legislation, said Adam Winkler, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of “Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America.”

“Part of the story is that the N.R.A. fights tooth and nail against any policy,” Mr. Winkler said. “The laws that result are much less ambitious in their goals.”

The gun control laws had some effect. The 1934 restrictions curbed access to machine guns; crimes with those types of fully automatic firearms have essentially dried up since the era of Al Capone. The 1968 prohibitions on who can own a weapon, and requirements for licensing dealers, are still in place.

The 1994 ban on assault weapons has become a particular and recent subject of intense debate. The N.R.A. has cited a 2004 analysis funded by the Justice Department to argue that the “ban could not be credited with any reduction in crime.”

On the other hand, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, has claimed in a Twitter post that “the number of gun massacres fell by 37%” while the ban was in place.

Christopher Koper, a professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and the lead author of the study that is cited by the N.R.A., has repeatedly said that the ban had mixed effects and final results would not be immediately evident.

“My work is often cited in misleading ways that don’t give the full picture,” Mr. Koper said Thursday in an email. “These laws can modestly reduce shootings overall” and reduce the number and severity of mass shootings.

Ms. Feinstein’s claim that the ban drastically reduced gun massacres comes from analysis by Louis Klarevas, a lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Boston. But Mr. Winkler noted that most mass shootings are committed with a handgun, not a military-grade assault weapon.

“There’s no anti-mass shooting law to test,” said Charles Branas, the chairman of the epidemiology department at the School of Public Health at Columbia University in New York. “In terms of all of these instances, not just mass shootings, we need the politicians to create more laws to test.”