The Case Against Futility

There are more firearms than people in the United States, and guns are far more likely to be used in violent crime than in other wealthy nations. Annual sales in recent years range from 20 million to 40 million. But does that mean that guns are readily available to every American who wants one? Or that it is futile to attempt to regulate them? The short answer to both questions is no. The campaign to do away with long-standing regulations is a threat to public safety.

Federal regulation for the purpose of curtailing gun violence dates back over 90 years. In 1934, the National Firearms Act imposed a $200 tax (confiscatory at the time) on sales of Tommy guns, sawed-off shotguns and other weapons favored by gangsters in the Roaring ’20s, and required that owners register these weapons. The modern regulatory framework was detailed by the Gun Control Act, enacted in 1968. It sought to prevent certain high-risk groups of people (those with a serious criminal record, a history of involuntary commitment and other things) from obtaining or possessing firearms. The law restricts commercial manufacture, shipment and sale to those who have a federal license. Retail dealers are required to conduct background checks on would-be buyers and keep records to assist law enforcement in tracing guns used in crime. A number of states supplement federal regulations, for example by requiring a government-issued permit or license to purchase handguns, and the Gun Control Act’s restrictions on interstate commerce are intended to prevent state regulations from being undercut.

This regulatory effort has failed in the sense that there is a great deal of gun crime, to a large extent committed by individuals who are legally barred from possessing guns. But it is a mistake to conclude that these regulations on commerce are worthless just because they are widely violated. Things could be worse. That truth is all too clearly illustrated by the U.S. experience in deregulating other problematic commodities. The campaign to legalize cannabis was supported in part by the argument that “everyone is doing it anyway.” But states that have legalized cannabis have experienced large increases in the number of frequent users, as well as the rapid proliferation of novel, high-potency products with yet-unknown health risks. There is a similar dynamic with online sports betting, a common practice made much more common now that it has been legalized in a majority of states.

The “futility” argument asserts that crime-involved individuals are highly motivated to go armed, since they need a gun to intimidate rivals, commit robbery or protect their drug stash. In this view, they will do whatever is necessary to obtain a gun. In economic lingo, their demand is inelastic. And in any case, so it is claimed, not that much effort is required when guns are pervasive. The argument was propounded by prominent scholars of the 1980s like Peter Rossi, James Wright and James Jacobs. But the argument is called into question by the behavioral revolution in social science. While there surely are some dangerous people who are enterprising enough to overcome any barriers to obtaining a gun, that is not likely to be the norm. Seemingly weak regulations can often have leverage on even life-and-death outcomes, as illustrated by the well-documented power of minimum drinking age laws to reduce traffic fatalities and violent crime. The fact that only a small minority of individuals incarcerated for gun crimes sourced their weapons from licensed dealers suggests that even weakly enforced supply regulations influence the supply channels available to dangerous individuals.

Of course, supply regulation is not the only potentially effective strategy for gun violence prevention. Gun violence represents the intersection of violence (most of which does not involve guns) and gun availability. There are numerous effective approaches to reducing violence rates — in Vital City, John Roman listed 20 evidence-based options. An effective program to reduce violence (such as hot-spot policing or dropout prevention) will typically reduce both gun violence and violence perpetrated with knives and clubs and fists. As we write this (in June 2025), it appears we are in the midst of a historic decline in violence of all sorts, beginning in 2022. Gun violence is to a large extent embedded in overall violence.

Successful gun control programs, on the other hand, reduce the portion of violent crimes that involve a gun without necessarily affecting the overall amount of violence. Reducing gun use makes violence less deadly. Even a one-for-one replacement of shootings with knife attacks reduces the number of deaths, simply because guns are so much more lethal than other commonly available weapons. In looking at international comparisons with Canada and other wealthy nations, the U.S. homicide rate is a far greater outlier than our overall rates of serious criminal violence — simply because violence here is much more likely to involve guns.

One analogy is highway safety. Traffic fatalities are reduced by regulations that require air bags and other measures that make crashes less deadly — even if the overall accident rate is unchanged. Similarly, effective gun control makes violence less deadly. It can also reduce the threat of certain types of violent crime for which firearms are central to the perpetrators’ success. Think of political assassination or mass attacks in schools and other public places. While relatively rare, such events have an outsized impact on quality of life.

So, given the importance of curtailing gun use in criminal violence, the case for regulating gun commerce must still overcome the “futility” claim. That case rests on an understanding of the distribution and supply of firearms. First, even though there are more than enough guns in circulation for everyone to have one, the fact is that most do not. Only about one-third of adults, and 40% of households, own a gun. In that sense, a majority of adults do not have ready access. The stockpile of guns tends to be concentrated, with the most heavily armed 10% of owners owning an average of 25 guns each, nearly half the total. Furthermore, guns are far sparser in some jurisdictions than others. The national household prevalence of 40% is an average concealing considerable geographic variation. In particular, it is lower in metropolitan areas than rural areas, and lower in the Northeast and West Coast than elsewhere. Comparing large cities, more than one-third of the households in St. Louis, New Orleans and Nashville own guns, while ownership is only about 10% in New York and Boston.

The prevalence of gun ownership in a jurisdiction is correlated with the likelihood that robberies and assaults will be committed with a gun. The likely explanation relates to what economists call “transactions costs” — the effort, delay and risk (as well as the money price) entailed in acquiring a gun. The guns used in crime are typically acquired a few weeks or months before the crime, and usually from an acquaintance, fellow gang member or other individual in the social network. In cities where guns are relatively sparse, one’s social network is generally less likely to include gun owners, especially those who are willing to sell or loan one of their guns. Surveys of individuals who are underage or who have criminal records help document this sort of differentiation. Some respondents indicate that they would like a gun but don’t know how to obtain one, or that it would take them a week or more to obtain one. Others, particularly those more embedded in criminal networks, report ready access. Indeed, one “benefit” from joining a gang is that fellow gang members may serve as connections for obtaining a gun.

While it is relatively rare for the guns used in crime to have been acquired directly from a federally licensed dealer (FFL), those dealers play an important role in the diversion of guns from the legal supply stream. FFLs, who collectively sold about 25 million guns annually during the COVID years, are required to conduct background checks on would-be buyers and enforce state and local regulations, if any. To evade these requirements, a proscribed person can possibly find a corrupt dealer or present false identification to a careless dealer, although this practice does not appear particularly widespread. More important is that proscribed individuals can prevail on some entitled person to serve as a “straw purchaser,” buying from a dealer on their behalf. There is an analogy here to the beer market; underage individuals can access this market with the help of a false ID or an adult willing to buy for them. Illicit transactions are embedded in the much larger flow of licit commerce.

Unlike in the case of underage beer, the supply chain of illicit gun commerce includes some professional straw purchasers who acquire guns from dealers with the intention of trafficking them. It appears that the hundreds of thousands of firearms that flow from the U.S. to Mexico each year are largely sourced from FFLs by straw purchasers. The same is true for interstate trafficking to New York, Chicago and other jurisdictions that have relatively stringent regulations. Recent changes in federal law dating to 2022 have made it easier to prosecute such straw purchasers and traffickers.

There are a variety of approaches to make it more difficult for those more likely to misuse firearms — including youths, those with serious criminal records and domestic batterers — to obtain them, even within a gun-rich environment in which most adult citizens are allowed to acquire as many guns as they want. While not an exhaustive list, here are a handful that would likely pass muster with the Supreme Court’s current interpretation of the Second Amendment:

State permit or license requirements. As of 2024, 10 states require handgun buyers to have a permit or license issued by a law enforcement authority — although such laws have been a prime target for the deregulation movement. In practice, they are enforced primarily by retail dealers, who are required to deny sale to a customer who lacks a permit. One prominent case study is of Missouri’s decision to repeal their requirement in 2007. That repeal increased gun violence rates, in part because it accelerated the connection between dealer sale and criminal use, likely by making it easier for proscribed people to obtain guns from dealers directly (known as “lie and buy”) or indirectly (through straw purchasers). More generally, even accounting for their other laws, states with permit requirements are less likely to be principal sources of illegal cross-border gun flows within the U.S. and across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Federal law enforcement. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) is charged with issuing licenses for firearms commerce, regulating dealers and conducting criminal investigations of trafficking. Its firearms division has long been understaffed, and the Trump administration’s plans to further cut investigator staff are estimated to reduce ATF’s already meager capacity to regulate the industry by about 40%. If licensed dealers have little to fear from the regulators, and traffickers are confident they will not be prosecuted despite the new legal tools created by the 2022 act, the results are predictable. While most of the country’s nearly 80,000 FFLs are undoubtedly compliant, a few corrupt or negligent actors can play an outsize role in the illegal supply of firearms. Increasing the likelihood of random audits with direct sanctions for noncompliance, while using better data to target scofflaw dealers, has been shown to improve compliance in other industries. It has the potential to reduce the flow of guns to illegal trafficking, but it will require resources. Effective regulation does require some level of enforcement.

Sustaining the new regulations on “ghost guns.” While the primary sources of guns used in crime remain various types of diversion from legal commerce, a new supply channel has become prominent over the last decade: privately made firearms (PMFs). The initial concern was that individuals would take advantage of advances in machine tools and additive manufacturing to produce high-quality guns in their garages — and some do. But the surge in PMFs’ involvement in gun crimes between 2015 and 2022 was primarily the result of the marketing of easy-to-assemble gun kits by commercial companies, most notably Polymer80. These kits were not initially regulated as firearms, so Polymer80 could and did ship them directly to customers, across state lines and with no questions asked. In 2022, ATF changed its ruling and required that these kits, like other firearms, be shipped to licensed dealers, who would in turn require background checks of buyers. The effectiveness of this regulation is suggested by charting the steep increase in PMF prevalence among “crime guns” confiscated in California, the state that led the way in PMFs and that also happens to have relatively stringent regulations on firearm sales and transfers. That rapid growth ended abruptly in California in 2022, with subsequent declines in 2023 shown in some Northeastern cities (New York City, Philadelphia and Baltimore). While the Supreme Court has upheld the 2022 ATF rule, the question now is whether the Trump administration will push to rescind those recent regulations.

Local buyback programs. While it is commonplace for local agencies and nonprofits to run short-duration gun buyback programs, there is no indication that they are effective in reducing gun misuse. New York City has what seems a better idea. For many years, the NYPD has offered to buy operable guns from all comers at $200 apiece, no questions asked. One logical consequence is to set a floor on gun prices, since why sell a junker gun to the teen next door for anything less than you can get in a legal transaction with the police? There will of course be individuals who take advantage of the program to make a profit, and the NYPD has modified its program to limit the number of compensated trade-ins per person or offer higher prices for handguns or certain types of semiautomatic rifles. A program that establishes a long-standing price floor may be enough to discourage some cash-strapped teens and adults living on the margins, and will at least reduce the fraction of the time that they can afford to be armed.

The regulatory framework created by the Gun Control Act of 1968 is weak by international standards, but it is far from nothing. Compared with laissez-faire, it serves to reduce gun availability and use by crime-involved people. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of some firearm regulations has only been clearly revealed when they are repealed. The problem in regulating gun commerce to reduce gun violence is not some intrinsic futility of this approach, but rather the lack of political will.