Reducing Violence?: Examining the Impact of Gun Control Legislation in Massachusetts

Abstract

Over the last decade, high-profile mass shootings in the United States have brought gun policies back to the front of the public policy debate. While Americans remain divided on a number of gun policies, background checks have drawn bipartisan support. This study examines the impact of changes to background checks and licensing policies shortly after the passage of the 2014 Massachusetts gun legislation on violent crimes in counties from 2006 to 2016. Using fixed-effects negative binomial regression models, the findings show no immediate impact on violent crimes. While there is no statistically significant association between the passage of the gun legislation and most violent crimes, the models for robbery indicate a small increase in robberies while controlling for other variables. The findings are consistent with those in other studies and future studies should explore long-term effects following the passage of the legislation.

Keywords:

• Firearms
• homicides
• gun law
• gun control
• violent crimes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Jack McDevitt for his comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 While previous studies examining the effects of gun control laws on homicides use incarceration rates, this measure was unavailable at the county-level and, therefore, I included a measure for the jail population rate, which is available at the county-level for Massachusetts from the Vera Institute (Fridel, 2020).

2 The values for percent unemployed, percent college-educated, percent divorced, and percent veterans were missing for one Massachusetts county, Dukes County, in 2006 from the U.S. Census Bureau. Additionally, the values for percent excessive drinking were missing for 2006, 2007, and 2013 from the County Health Rankings Report for Massachusetts by the University of Wisconsin’s Population Health Institute making up about one-quarter of the data. In order to fill the missing values for these variables, the linear interpolation-extrapolation command was used in STATA 16.

3 Previous studies have also included violent crime rate as a control variable while examining the effects of different types of gun laws at the state-level. However, this variable presented a harmful level of multicollinearity and, therefore, was not included in the analysis.

4 Other models were examined using a dummy variable to capture the location of the counties that border states with weaker gun control legislation and similar patterns were found. These results are available upon request.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Janice Iwama

Janice Iwama is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Justice, Law & Criminology at American University. Her work focuses on improving our understanding on gun violence, hate crimes, and racial profiling across communities while considering demographic, economic, and political, as well as spatial and temporal changes in the United States. Previously, she worked on an assessment study examining the 2014 Massachusetts Gun Violence Reduction Act funded by the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security (EOPSS) to examine the impact of the new gun legislation across the state.