Throwback Thursday
The Denver Accord Fact Sheets - Part 5: Reduce Firearm Lethality
This article was originally published on GVPedia.
The Denver Accord is a comprehensive gun violence prevention platform — led by GVPedia and supported by more than 40 organizations nationally — designed to guide policymakers’ efforts to reduce gun violence in the United States. It combines best practices from across the country with evidence-based research to create a comprehensive and effective set of policies and programs intended to stop the scourge of gun violence.
The Denver Accord includes four guiding principles and nine policy positions that, working in conjunction with each other, will stem the epidemic. This is the fifth in a series of fact sheets outlining those nine policy positions, which we will be highlighting across the next few Throwback Thursday posts.
There is no single solution to gun violence in America but it is clear that more guns do not make people safer. It is a multifaceted problem that requires a comprehensive solution.
The Denver Accord Part 5: Reduce Firearm Lethality
Regulate existing assault firearms and ban the future sale of assault firearms
The military-style features of an assault weapon increase death and injury by enabling a shooter to quickly spray gunfire over a wide area while maintaining control of the firearm.
Prohibit future sale and transfer of assault style, semi-automatic firearms.
Grandfather existing assault style, semi-automatic weapons under the National Firearms Act.
Prohibit open and concealed carrying of semi-automatic and automatic assault weapons.
Create a federal gun buyback program.
Reduce Ammunition Lethality
Prohibit specific types of ammunition designed to substantially increase lethality, including armor piercing rounds, hydro-shock rounds, fragmenting rounds, and hollow points.
Prohibit the manufacture, sale, transfer, or possession of high-capacity magazines (more than ten rounds in a magazine).
Develop a national ballistic fingerprinting database.
Ban undetectable/untraceable firearms
Guns manufactured privately by 3D printing processes are not controlled by licensed manufacturers, and therefore are easily made without serial numbers and in the near future could be made without metal, making them untraceable and undetectable.
Ban gun components from which a firearm without a serial number can be readily manufactured or otherwise assembled.
Ban 3D printing of guns by unlicensed manufacturers or dealers.
Ban distribution of gun blueprints for 3D printers.
Mandate that all firearms must be visible to security screening devices
Short-Barreled Rifles
Revise existing National Firearms Act regulations on short-barreled rifles to include bullpup style firearms.
Develop policy to limit high caliber handguns because of their increased lethality.
Incentivize market development of modern security features, like smart guns, through mandated public spending.
The 2014 study of shootings between 1982 to 2011 also found that state assault weapon bans were effective at reducing mass shooting fatalities, but not injuries.
A 2018 study of civilian active shooter incidents between 2000 and 2017 found that more people were injured and killed when semi-automatic rifles were used compared to other firearms because assault rifles are easy to use, accept large-capacity magazines, and fire higher-velocity bullets.
The federal assault weapon ban was associated with a 25% decrease in mass shooting deaths and a 40% reduction in fatalities over 10 years compared to the previous decade.
In the decade after the ban expired, mass shooting deaths increased by 347%, even as overall violent crime continued to decrease. Furthermore, the average number of fatalities per shooting fell during the assault weapon ban and rose after it expired.
A 2019 study found that more than 85% of public mass shooting fatalities were caused by assault rifles, and mass shooting fatalities were 70% less likely to occur during the federal assault weapons ban (1994 through 2004).
Assault rifles are used far more frequently by people who commit mass shootings than non-mass shootings, however, mass shooting fatalities are a very small percentage of overall murders.
Since the federal assault weapons ban expired in 2004, the share of assault rifles and other high-capacity semi-automatic weapons recovered at crime scenes increased from 33% to 112%.
The share of crimes involving assault weapons declined between 17% and 72% during the federal assault weapons ban in the following U.S. cities: Anchorage, Baltimore, Boston, Miami, Milwaukee, and St. Louis.
The share of large-capacity magazine firearms recovered by Richmond, VA police increased from 10.4% in 2008-2009, the final two years of the federal assault weapon ban, to 22%.
Between 1990 and 2017, 64% of mass shootings involved high-capacity magazines and shootings involving a high-capacity magazine resulted in 62% more fatalities. States without high-capacity magazine bans experienced more than three times as many mass shooting deaths.
One-third of the 2,627 guns recovered by Baltimore, MD police between January 1, 2017 and April 29, 2018 had magazine capacities of more than 10 rounds. A 2019 report by the Police Executive Research Foundation recommended limiting the capacity of ammunition magazines to ten rounds and banning bump stocks.
High-caliber handguns are more deadly than small-caliber weapons. Caliber refers to the size of a bullet’s diameter, which affects both the bullet’s force and size of the hole it makes in a human body.
A 2018 study found that Boston, MA shooting victims were 2.3 times more likely to die when shot with medium-caliber handguns than small-caliber handguns. If all shooters had used large-caliber handguns, Boston’s homicide rate would have increased 43%.
Ghost guns, which are easily made from a kit, are difficult to trace because they lack serial numbers as well as manufacturer or sales records that law enforcement can use to trace them. 3D printed guns present additional challenges because fingerprints are more difficult to recover on plastic guns, the guns lack serial numbers, and the guns lack security exemplars which are used by security metal detectors to reveal hidden firearms.
Ghost guns are increasingly being recovered from crime scenes. Following the November 2019 shooting at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California involving a 16-year-old armed with an unregistered and untraceable handgun, the ATF reported that one-third of all the firearms seized in Southern California are ghost guns.
Developing a comprehensive national ballistic fingerprinting database would reduce gun violence by assisting law enforcement in solving gun crimes. Since 1999, the ATF’s National Integrated Ballistic Information Network (NIBIN) has captured more than 3.3 million pieces of ballistic evidence and confirmed more than 111,000 matches to crime guns.
Conclusions:
By regulating existing military-style assault weapons under the National Firearms Act, the U.S. could prohibit the manufacture, importation, sale, transfer, open carry, and concealed carry of these firearms.
Despite suffering from significant limitations, the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 successfully reduced the number of mass shootings and assault weapons diverted for use in crimes until it expired in 2004.
High-capacity magazine bans reduce the number of mass shootings and the number of people killed in high-fatality mass shootings, in part because lower capacity weapons provide an opportunity for someone to fight back while the shooter reloads.
Assault weapons are typically the weapon of choice for public mass shootings, and assault pistols with high capacity magazines are increasingly being recovered at crime scenes.
Unserialized firearms, commonly referred to as ghost guns, circumvent background checks and are much harder to trace when recovered at a crime scene.
Developing a comprehensive national ballistic fingerprinting database would reduce gun violence by assisting law enforcement in solving gun crimes.
The full document can be found here: The Denver Accord Part 5: Reduce the Lethality of Firearms
Recommended Reading:
Diving into the Data on Assault Weapons Bans
People Kill People. But the Bullets Seem to Matter
Citations and Studies for the Denver Accord, Part 5: Reducing Firearm Lethality
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Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research (2016). Permit to Purchase Licensing [Fact sheet]. Retrieved from https://www.jhsph.edu/research/centers-and-institutes/johns-hopkins-center-for-gun-policy-and-research/public ations/
Wintemute, G.J., Wright, M.A., Castillo-Carniglia, Á., Shev, A., Cerda, M. (2017). Firearms, alcohol and crime: Convictions for driving under the influence (DUI) and other alcohol-related crimes and risk for future criminal activity among authorised purchasers of handguns, Injury Prevention, 24. doi:10.1136/injuryprev-2016-042181.
Mcginty, E., Webster, D. (2017). The Roles of Alcohol and Drugs in Firearm Violence. JAMA Internal Medicine, 177. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.8180.
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Yablon, A. (2016 March 8). Rare Gun Store Inspection Casts Doubt on Government Tallies of Lost and Stolen Firearms. The Trace.
de Jager E, Goralnick E, McCarty JC, Hashmi ZG, Jarman MP, Haider AH. Lethality of Civilian Active Shooter Incidents With and Without Semiautomatic Rifles in the United States. JAMA. 2018;320(10):1034–1035. doi:10.1001/jama.2018.11009
Selman, Y.S., (2011 January). Medico-legal Study of Shockwave Damage by High Velocity Missiles in Firearm Injuries, Journal of the Faculty of Medicine, 53(4), 401-405
Image by F. Muhammad from Pixabay.