ABSTRACT
The rationale for gun control, of course, includes the assumption that the availability of guns has a significant net positive effect on violence rates. Many of the same problems afflict the use of cross-national violence rates to assess gun law impact that afflicted the effort to use such data to assess the impact of gun ownership levels. One of the few gun laws showing some evidence of effectiveness in prior research was a mandatory-penalty carry law, the Bartley-Fox law. Most gun laws regulate only handguns, or regulate handguns more stringently than the more numerous long guns such as rifles or shotguns. The main technical problem with this scheme is that ammunition is even easier to manufacture at home than guns. The strongest, least ambiguous findings indicated that bans on gun possession by mentally ill persons reduce homicide, and that bans on handgun sales, and local or state gun dealer licensing, reduce robbery.
