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Analysis reveals price insensitivity in firearm buyers, suggesting targeted policy changes may be effective.
This paper provides a critical input into crafting effective firearms policy: an understanding of consumer demand for guns. We estimate individual-level price sensitivity and substitution patterns across gun types using stated-choice experiments. We find that potential firearm buyers are price insensitive overall but that first-time buyers are the most price sensitive. We also estimate considerable substitution from semiautomatic long guns (sometimes called “assault weapons”) to handguns, which are associated with more crimes per gun. (JEL D12, D72, K23, K42, L51, L64, M31)
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Moshary et al. (2025) studied this question.
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