Former Penn researchers' studies lend fodder to gun debate

A Penn criminology study has been dragged into the current gun control debate.

A series of studies from two former Penn researchers, published in 1997 and 2004, respectively, have been used as evidence by advocates and opponents of a plan to revive the Federal Assault Weapons Ban.

Part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, the ban prohibited the manufacture of certain kinds of semi-automatic firearms — commonly known as “assault weapons.” It was passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1994 and expired in 2004.

The only scholarly research on the success of the first ban — funded by a $39,000 grant from the Justice Department — was published in 1997 by Jeffrey Roth and Christopher Koper, who were both at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. at the time. When the ban expired in 2003, Koper looked at the effects of the ban as a whole. The second study was released the next year.

In 2001, Roth and Koper both took positions in the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology at Penn as associate research director and senior research associate, respectively. Roth retired in 2010, while Koper is now at George Mason University.

Koper said that his 2004 study had “a complicated and mixed set of findings,” giving both sides of the firearm issue material to “cherry pick.”

Roth said he is “not surprised” that the study has been picked up by political figures looking to justify their position empirically.

“On a topic like this, you expect your study will be used in a political context,” he added.

Both researchers said they do not take sides in the gun control debate, but merely want to inform citizens and policy makers about the facts.

“You hope policy makers will consider the research in its entirety,” Koper said, “but they cancel each other out, so it’s not a completely one-sided story.”

He added that the 2004 study received some attention when it was released, but has garnered much more since the debate on gun control was reignited after last December’s shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

In January, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) introduced a bill to bring back the ban on assault weapons.

Senate Bill 150 contains many of the same elements as the first ban, while adding additional components to ban the importation of assault weapons and large-capacity magazines.

A January letter from 18 Democratic senators supporting the bill cites both the 1997 study and the 2004 study while claiming that gun murders declined by 6.7 percent during the ban and the use of assault weapons in crime dropped by 67 percent.

On the other side of the debate, when Wayne LaPierre, CEO and executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, went in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on guns in January, he made direct reference to one of the studies.

“Independent studies, including a study from the Clinton Justice Department, proved that ban had no impact on lowering crime,” he said. Footnotes in his testimony indicated he was referring to Koper and Roth’s 1997 study.

NRA spokesperson Jacqueline Otto said in an email that the organization opposes both the proposed bans on semi-automatic firearms and high-capacity magazines.

Roth said that the 1997 study, in which he was more involved than the 2004 study, found the effect of the ban on total homicides to be “minimal,” because assault weapons are not frequently used in those types of crimes.

He also cited the fact that many semiautomatic firearms — differentiated from assault weapons by “cosmetic differences”— were exempted from the ban as a reason the decline was not greater.

While both sides have cited the same 1997 study, their different analyses have prompted criticism.

An article published by the NRA on Jan. 25 accused Feinstein of misrepresenting the findings of Koper and Roth’s 1997 study.

“The misuse and misinterpretation of study findings has become a common tactic of anti-gun politicians because they know the 1994 ban had no real impact on gun violence,” the article said.

The only other major analysis of the ban’s effectiveness was done in 2011 by Washington Post reporters David Fallis and James Grimaldi, according to Koper. It found that in Virginia, there was a dramatic rise in the number of assault weapons seized following the ban’s expiration in 2003.

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