Firearm Sales

New mass shootings reignite the debate over gun regulation. Some policymakers and advocates call to restore a federal ban on assault weapons—a fuzzy category that includes semi-automatic rifles and shotguns—while others push for taxes or mandatory waiting periods. 

Yet so far, research on the market for firearms has been thin, stymieing efforts for effective regulation.

In a study forthcoming in American Economic Review: Insights, Assistant Professor Sarah Moshary and collaborators from Chicago Booth used marketing research techniques to study consumer behavior in the market for firearms. Their work provides insight into how people decide to buy a gun and which one to purchase—which are key to understanding the likely effects of gun regulations.

“Firearm regulation is a fraught topic in the United States, and people across the country have very different ideas about how and where they should be sold and to whom,” Moshary says. “Our research aims to give a better understanding of the market to inform those discussions.”

Moshary and her co-authors presented a sample of more than 4,000 Americans who either own a gun or are interested in buying one with a hypothetical choice of three firearms and asked them to select one. They then asked whether they’d buy that gun at certain prices; by repeating the task with varying prices and different firearms, they deduced how much gun prices would have to rise to get people to abandon their top choices. 

The researchers then used an economic model to estimate what gun-buyers would do if their top choice became unavailable or too expensive. They found that those who wanted to buy an assault weapon were much more likely to buy a handgun than no gun at all. Those who were interested in buying a pistol or revolver were more likely to give up on the purchase. 

The findings suggest that restrictions or taxes on assault weapons could do less to reduce the number of guns in circulation than those targeting handguns. More work is needed to understand the extent to which these policies would reduce violence. Still, Moshary believes her team’s approach can provide evidence to inform contentious policy debates.