ABSTRACT
Gun control legislation, existing and proposed, produces partisanship and fervor beyond any of the other issues surrounding weapons issues in the United States. This chapter reviews the technical issues involved in assessing the effectiveness of such legislation when enacted and some of the landmark studies that have attempted to estimate the direction and magnitude of such effects. It provides some of the critical technical issues that arise in assessing the impact of legislation on an area of human behavior. The chapter also reviews the procedures and evaluates the findings of the major studies of impact assessment. It attempts to draw out the implications of research on the effectiveness of gun control legislation. The implicit model or models of the system surrounding the distribution and use of guns also determine the kinds of consequences that one can anticipate from a particular legislative act.
