Law Commons^™

Why The Nra Fights Background Checks, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

"We think it's reasonable to provide mandatory instant criminal background checks for every sale at every gun show. No loopholes anywhere for anyone." Did President Barack Obama say that? No, that's from an advertisement taken out by the NRA in USA Today in 1999.

But a more powerful NRA today is in no mood to follow the slogan of their "be reasonable" ad campaign of 14 years ago. This relatively small group -- the NRA boasts that it has 4.5 million members, which is peanuts compared to the roughly 40 million AARP members -- might have the political power to …

Substance Vs. Sideshows In The More Guns, Less Crime Debate: A Comment On Moody, Lott, And Marvell, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

We are grateful to authors Carlisle Moody, John Lott, and Thomas Marvell (hereafter MLM) for their close attention to our article “The Impact of Right-to- Carry Laws and the NRC Report: Lessons for the Empirical Evaluation of Law and Policy,” which was published in the American Law and Economics Review (Aneja, Donohue, and Zhang 2011), and then re-issued as a National Bureau of EconomicResearch working paper with some substantively unimportant errors corrected (Aneja, Donohue, and Zhang 2012). (Henceforth, we too will use the abbreviation ADZ to refer to our jointly authored work.) We think the attention to this work is …

Better Laws Might Have Helped In Tucson, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

In an ideal world, stable, cautious law-abiding citizens would have access to guns and others would not. We would like wise regulation and prudent personal decisions about carrying and using guns. Deciding on the elements of wise laws and consumer decisions requires extensive data analysis beyond any single episode, like the horrific killings in Tucson. But this tragedy highlights some relevant issues.