An economic approach to gun control: analysis of the Gun Violence Prevention and Community Safety Act of 2020

Joseph G. Eisenhauer

Applied Economics Letters, 2025, vol. 32, issue 1, 23-27

Abstract: Although gun violence has become one of the major social issues of the era, economic research on gun control has been severely lacking. The present note examines the proposed sales tax on firearms featured in the Gun Violence Prevention and Community Safety Act of 2020. We apply prior estimates of the price elasticities of supply and demand for firearms to a simple model of ad valorem taxation in order to calculate the tax revenue and sales reduction that could result from the bill’s enactment. We find that the proposed legislation would most likely reduce new gun sales by 30% to 44% and generate approximately $1.47 billion to $1.9 billion in federal tax revenue annually to be used for prevention and intervention against gun violence.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13504851.2023.2244226 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:apeclt:v:32:y:2025:i:1:p:23-27

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEL20

DOI: 10.1080/13504851.2023.2244226

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics Letters is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics Letters from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().