More Thoughts on Creating an Effective Assault Weapons Ban

Yesterday, I tried to correct some myths about research on the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban under the headline How to Create an Assault Weapons Ban That Would Actually Cut Down on Violence. Commenters noted that I had not delivered on that headline. Here is my attempt to do so.

As Emily Badger astutely pointed out, we know very little about how guns get into the hands of criminals who use them in street crimes. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms "traces" these guns on behalf of local law enforcement to discover their path of ownership. Easy, right? Wrong. For one thing, ATF does not make those data available to researchers, so there are few good studies to refer to. For another, there are so many ways to legally obtain a firearm from an unlicensed dealer (which appears to be the original source of most crime guns) that the traces do not yield much useful information.