Online Gun Search as a Proxy for Gun Sales: Does it Support "More Guns, Less Crime"?

• In Event: Guns and Crime

Abstract

The Second Amendment of the United States authorizes the people to keep and bear arms. Over two hundred years later, the United States suffers from gun violence and has the highest gun violence rate among wealthy countries. Lott and Mustard (1997) used city, county, and state-level data to examine the effect of gun laws (concealed-carry) on gun violence; they found more guns could result in less crime. However, RAND (2023) published a systematic review which indicated that more guns may increase firearm homicides. Due to the limitation of data on gun sales, the related studies applying gun sales data on gun violence are rare. In this study, we utilized gun sales online search data from Google Trends and used a fixed effect model at the State and Designated Market Area levels. We also utilized the COVID-19 Lockdown as a natural experiment and applied the difference-in-difference method. The gun violence data is downloaded from the Gun Violence Archive. The results show that when more people search online to buy guns, the region's gun violence rate actually increases. Our result does not support the claim "More Guns, Less Crime." Instead, it suggests either "More Guns, More Crime" or "More Crime, More Guns."

Authors

• Yu-Hsuan Liu, St. John's University

• Tzu-Ying Lo, St. John's University