Over 20,000 gun laws on the books?

[javafiend]

I keep seeing this claim. 20,000 is such a nice round number. Jon Vernick, director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Gun Policy and Research, and colleague Lisa Hepburn claimed to have examined gun laws and their actual number and conclude that the figure is essentially a myth. They date the origin of the number to longtime NRA supporter Congressman John Dingell (D-Mich.), who first used the number, without any attribution, in 1965. It's never gone away.

"Twenty Thousand Gun-Control Laws?"
Jon S. Vernick, Johns Hopkins University
Lisa M. Hepburn, Harvard University
http://www.brookings.edu/es/urban/publications/gunbook4.pdf

Evaluating Gun Policy
Effects on Crime and Violence
Jens Ludwig and Philip I. Cook, eds.
Brookings Institution Press/Brookings Metro Series 2003.
http//www.brookings.edu/press/books/evaluatinggunpolicy.htm

 

[Gray Peterson]

He's correct. Dingell could have been correct in 1965, when there was no such animal as state preemption of local gun laws except for perhaps Washington state and a few others.

 

[cuchulainn]

The 20,000 figure may indeed be a Dingell-berry, but in typical anti-gun pseudo-science, the (ahem) "researchers" cherrypick data to get the results they want. They pretend that preemption laws have ended most or all local gun laws by excluding from their count those gun laws that are not preempted. Note this passage in which laws against carrying guns are not "gun control laws" but laws against possession are:

Another problem with estimating the number of gun laws is agreeing on a definition of just what is to be included. For example, many local laws prohibit carrying or firing guns in public places. Inclusion of such laws would certainly inflate national estimates of the number of gun laws. But if one considers only laws that control the manufacture, design, sale, purchase, or possession of guns—the cluster of laws many probably imagine as constituting gun-control laws—the number of gun control laws will be much smaller.

and

In our view, the discovery that there may be as few as 300 major statewide laws that fit our definition of a gun-control statute (with some states having as few as one or two such laws) yields a far more appropriate figure for public-policy discussion.

<emphasis added by cuchulainn>

and

The most informative answer to the question of “how many gun-control laws?†is then “about 300 major state and federal laws, and an unknown but shrinking number of local laws.â€

<emphasis added by cuchulainn ... note that they have not tried to assess the number of local gun laws>

 

[waterhouse]

I just opened up the ATF "State Laws and Published Ordinances" book. I started counting all of the numbered codes (eg: 13A-11-60 Possession or sale of of brass or steel teflon coated handgun ammunition), but did not count the subsections of the codes. Sometimes there are about 15 subsections, so often there are only one or two laws per page, but sometimes there are 15 or so laws per page. Also, some of the fancy numbered codes are "definitions", so that might throw the folowing numbers off.

I didn't count super carefully, but there were about 112 laws in the first 16 pages, or about 7 laws per page. I don't know whether 16 pages is a sufficient sample size or not to get an average, but also I don't really care that much, I was just a little curious.

Anyhow, the book has 426 pages of gun laws, which by my math approximates out to around 3,000 laws.

However, if each subsection of a law counts as a law, I'm sure there are well over 20,000, since page 1 alone contains almost 30 if you include the a), b), c) etc. subsections.

 

[javafiend]

In other words, it's a canard. Rep. Dingle pulled the number out of his - er, out of the air, and it has now become urban myth among the gun culture.

 

[Justin]

Did they actually think to call the representative up and ask him for a citation?