Passage of Oregon gun control measure spurred thousands more firearm sales, new study shows

The Civic's Education Initiative, a statewide program sponsored by the Oregon State Capital Foundation. They help Oregonians learn how our government and democracy work and how you can get involved and make a difference. Grant applications to help nonprofit and educational organizations support civics education programs throughout Oregon are open now through September 30th at Oregoncapitalfoundation.org. This fall, let Curiosity lead you to Newport. The Newport Festival of Arts and Culture brings together music, arts, markets, culinary experiences, and community celebrations on the Oregon Coast. From September through November, take in world-class performances, explore the historic Bayfront, and discover the stories that make Newport unique. Unlock exclusive lodging offers for OPB listeners at Discovernewport.com slash OPB. The Newport Festival of Arts and Culture? where creativity is in the water. This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I'm Jeff Norcross, in for Dave Miller. Four years ago, Oregonians passed Measure 114. It included banning high-capacity magazines and requiring safety training, completed background checks, and permits for firearm purchases. The measure is on hold while the Oregon Supreme Court takes a look, but... Its approval seems to have inspired a lot of Oregonians to buy a gun. Katie Bowman is an assistant professor of economics at the Oregon State. She's been studying this, and she joins us now. Katie, welcome to think out loud. Thank you for having me. So the reason we think more people are buying guns is the number of... background checks spiked after Measure 114 passed? Is that right? Yes, that's correct. So we don't have any sort of a centralized way to be able to actually measure firearm transactions or individual purchases. But what we do know is that they move along with firearm-related background checks. And so we're able to use those data to get a good sense of what's happening with firearm demand and firearm purchasing overall. Really, it is a... One-to-one ratio. Well, I don't know. Maybe I'm using statistical terms that I shouldn't. But you can draw a connection between the background checks and more people buying guns. Great question. So we can draw a connection, but not a one-to-one connection. And so just kind of intuitively, a background check could be denied or somebody could change their mind before following through with the purchase. Or you can have one background check with which you purchase more than one firearm. And so because of that, we don't expect it to be one-to-one. But we do expect them to move together. And so if we see that background checks increase by... 100%. We expect that that pretty well reflects the percentage increase in the overall number of firearms as well. And then we're also able to do something a little bit less formal than most of our results in the paper, but say, you know what, we do have some numbers that we can use to try and tighten up that, you know, that one to something comparison of background checks to firearm transactions. And so we do that in our research as well to try and put kind of a concrete number on the number of firearms that we think we have in Oregon as a result of Measure 114 that otherwise wouldn't have been sold. Well, based on that data, what is the concrete number? How many...

guns were bought in the last four years that otherwise we would not have expected. Yes. So our study goes from the month before the referendum took place. So October of 2022, and we wrap it up in March of 2024. And so during that 18 month period, we see in excess of 63,000 background checks, which we say is probably, it's going to be an underestimate of the overall number of firearms that were purchased. But it's going to be probably closer to something like 66,000 additional firearms that we don't. expect would have been purchased in the absence of the Measure 114 referendum as it unfolded. Should we be surprised by that? I think so. It's a pretty big number. And it's even a big number. I think the idea that folks go out and they buy firearms when they anticipate it's going to be harder to buy them in the future. That basic intuition is one that I think a lot of folks have. But just how many firearms we're talking about is larger than the types of spikes that we've seen in the past for things like, you know, highly publicized mass shootings, as well as, you know, the highly publicized Obama effect from that election or even the peak of the spike in the COVID years? I'm curious why you think that is. Why do you think the spike is higher? For what Measure 114 than it would be for the Obama presidency or Sandy Hook? Yeah. So I think in those sorts of cases, there's a generalized anxiety that we don't necessarily have present when we're looking at Measure 114, but there's also a less specific imminent binding constraint on future purchases, right? And so the Obama effect, folks might have said, well, maybe we're going to see firearm policy change. But that's a little bit different than Measure 114, where we're expecting, oh, on this date, we expect firearms. policy to meaningfully change in Oregon. Specific versus a generalized anxiety. That's the difference I hear you saying. Yes. And so you should know, right, that I'm a simple economist. And so that's a little outside of the data that I can look at. But I think that that's one kind of plausible explanation for something that characterizes a difference between those lower peaks and the really large spike that we see with Measure 114. Do you see a regional or county differences in the number of background checks that took place during this time? Yes. And so we do. kind of break things out separating counties based on whether they voted in favor or in opposition to Measure 114. I think one really interesting thing is that we see that these gun buying increases were widespread. And so we see them both in the counties that were really strongly in favor of Measure 114 and those that were opposed. With that said, on a per capita or a per person basis, we see the biggest increases in the places that were most opposed to Measure 114. If Measure 114 had gone into effect, soon after its passage and there wasn't a court challenge, do you think that might have affected gun purchase sales in Oregon? So what we see from other states that have implemented permit to purchase is that it does reduce the number of new purchases after those sorts of policies are implemented. And so I think that's likely what we would have seen in Oregon as well is some sort of a reduction in the overall number of firearm sales. You mentioned other permit to purchase restrictions that happened in other states. Is there an example that you can point to? I guess the

One of the actually canonical examples of this is actually moving in the other direction and looking at Missouri, which repealed Parenthood to purchase and had kind of the opposite effect of what you would kind of expect to see if you implemented a new Perman to Purchase program. People bought more guns out. The gun sales went down in Missouri. Sorry, the gun sales went up when Pernant to Purchase was repealed. Oh, I see what you're saying. Okay. If you're just tuning in, we're talking right now about what appears to be a bump in firearm sales after Oregonians approved a package of gun safety restrictions in 2022. Katie Bowman is an assistant professor of economic. at Oregon State. Tell me more about this study. What was the spark for doing it? Yeah, so I think partly this came about that myself and my co-authors, Ben Hanson, Garrett Stanford, Ed Rubin down at the University of Oregon. We were all in Oregon at the time in which Measure 114 was on the ballot. You had just gotten to town, in fact. I had just gotten into town, right? And so now there's this thing that many people are talking a lot about, right? And so we're looking at the world around us, and we are seeing this really interesting and important market and an opportunity to kind of study it and better understand for ourselves and for others. what's happening with firearm demand in Oregon and the effects of Measure 114. So there's one piece of it where, you know, we're economists and we see this really kind of interesting and important incentive in this in this demand change. And so we kind of want to study that. I think also there's just this tie-in that, you know, people feel very strongly about firearms and there are social implications of firearms. And so I think it's a particularly important thing to study and to understand these demand dynamics. What's been the reaction to the study? It's interesting. I think it's somewhat mixed. I think there's a group that says, well, we kind of knew this. We might not have known the exact numbers, but you're not telling us anything new. And I think that's a very reasonable reaction, right? These these. this general pattern of behavior is kind of what you might expect to see that people went out and they bought more firearms. And then we're able to add some precision around the numbers that we're talking about when we talk about that sort of behavior change or that sort of consumption pattern change. I think always when we talk about firearms, it's going to bring up a lot for people, right? This is a very charged topic. And so I think there's also always going to be some general anxieties talking about those generalized anxieties. generalized anxieties when someone comes out and is studying firearms. Your study period ended in March 24. And so there's been some time since then. Do you have a sense of what the picture is like now? That's a great question. So we think that the Measure 114 effects have really kind of tapered off. And so we think we're past the point where that referendum is actively affecting. buying dynamics at this moment in time. At the same time, we do have national trends in firearm that I think Oregon, you know, plays into as well. So I, yeah, I don't have a robust sense of anything particularly interesting in the Oregon firearm demand space since then, but I think we're past that bulk of the referendum related buying effects. Yeah, but the Oregon Supreme Court is going to come out with a ruling at some point, and so the issue will get hot again.

Do you think gun sales in Oregon might change if the state Supreme Court... upholds measure 114. Yeah, so I think that would be really kind of an opportunity to see what we observed in this first iteration of it, potentially happening again in the future, right? And so there's some conversation of maybe there's going to be a longer time period in which people can kind of go out and buy these guns. There was a one month time period for the referendum itself. If it's a longer time period, maybe we won't see the same height of that peak. But I think it's very likely from what we've found that we would expect to see. the more anticipatory purchases of firearms if Measure 114 is upheld and is going to be enacted in the future. If it's overturned? And if it's overturned, so we have a little bit less evidence of folks responding in the opposite direction and buying fewer firearms. There is nationally a discussion that sometimes termed the Trump slump and the idea that people do potentially taper some of their firearm demand when they think that it's likely they can purchase one in the future. There's a little bit less evidence. around just how prevalent that is, and it's a little bit hard to nail down, you know, what exactly is driving those reductions in purchasing when it's kind of a complicated world and a lot of things are changing within it. OPB's Troy Brunelson spoke this week to Amy Wexler, the executive director for the Gun Violence Prevention Organization Alliance for a Safe Oregon for his reporting on this study. Wexler said, we're looking at a long horizon here of keeping Oregonians safe. There may be more guns in homes right now, but we know Measure 114 will save lives when it's implemented. And I'm wondering if from your perspective, from somebody who's had their head in the data for four years, if you think she has reason to be optimistic like that. Yeah, I think that's pretty consistent with what we're finding here, right? So what we're showing is that there's this period of high responsiveness to these imminent changes in firearm demand in which there was this big increase in purchases that then kind of tapered off once the first judicial stay came out. But we also would be expecting that if permit to purchase were implemented in Oregon, that would reduce the number of firearms in the future. And so in that world, right, we would expect that. the kind of Measure 114 effects on overall firearm access would be delayed by the anticipatory effects rather than erased. And so I think that's fairly consistent with what she's describing there is looking into the long term. It's not such a large increase in firearm demand that permit to purchase will never kind of undo the excess demand that was created by the anticipatory behavior. You're an economist. I mean, you could put your head in all kinds of datasets. What is it about firearms that you find interesting? Yeah, I think it's a good question. It's not the only thing that I find interesting. And so I should note that, you know, I work on a variety of things that are largely related to public safety, to policing, and to other things that touch the courts. And so, you know, these are legal firearm sales that we're talking about within this paper. But there are downstream implications of those for some of these things that show up in the courts that I study as well. And so as an economist, I think whenever you have a large change in.

any sort of a market, it's something that we kind of, it draws our attention a little bit. But when you do something that has this, same sort of an implication for the types of things that I work on later on in the process, it's, you know, it becomes particularly interesting. And, you know, I'm in Oregon, right? And so this is a referendum that showed up in my mailbox. And so I'm interested just to understand the world around me and this has been a part of it. What's the next thing to study about this issue, do you think? So I think there's a few different directions we can take it into the future. I think we feel that this project is fairly complete in and of itself. But as you pointed out before, there may be additional changes or non-changes and publicized non-changes in the policy horizon or on the horizon for firearm policy in Oregon. I think it would be very interesting to take some of these tools and techniques that we used to study the referendum and bring them into the future with these future iterations. So more to come, maybe. Katie Bowman. Thank you so much for the time. I appreciate it. All right. Thank you. Katie Bowman is an assistant professor of economics at Oregon State University. Coming up after a break, we'll talk about one Oregon County that is doing comparatively well in getting kids to go to school. More on the low truancy rate in Malhear County. Coming up.