Brady Act Policy Evaluation of the Brady Act

The United States has struggled to curtail its distinct cultural vulnerability to gun violence through a combination of public information campaigns, criminal rehabilitation programs and federal legislation. To date, it remains unclear exactly what the impact of these efforts has been. This is especially true where legislative policy is concerned. The debate over gun control in the United States tends to invoke passionate response from people on both sides of the debate. Perhaps this was never better evidenced then in 1994 when President Clinton authorized the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. Named for the bodyguard of former President Ronald Reagan who sustained paralyzing injuries from the 1981 presidential assassination attempt, the Brady Act was designed to create sweeping changes in how firearms may be purchased as well as who may lawfully purchase them.

Unfortunately, today, almost 20 years after the passage of the Brady Act, it remains difficult to measure the exact success of the legislation in actually reducing gun fatalities and gun violence. According to a wide array of sources consulted on the subject, the perceived success of the legislation largely depends on how one chooses to measure it.

Brady Act:

The outcome of a policy evaluation on the Brady Act is highly contingent on the metrics chosen for assessment. Indeed, as the article by Cook (2000) would point out with the legislation passing the half-decade mark, the advent of background checks would have an absolute and measurable impact on the number of people who are able to purchase handgun. Cook notes that by 2000, the federal law was in effect in 32 states (whereas 18 states already held similar laws in place at the state government level) and that in these participating states, statistically...

Cook observes that there is a "large number of adults with felony convictions, histories of mental illness, or other disqualifying characteristics who are blocked from buying handguns from licensed gun dealers in the 32 Brady states (with a total of around 44,000 such denials in 1996 alone)." (Cook, p. 1)
This finding would suggest that the Brady Act has been successfully achieving the aim of preventing firearms from falling into the wrong hands. That number would increase in the ensuing years as well. Senator Carl Levin (2005), a strong advocate for the landmark gun control legislation, noted that in the year 2004, the background check program would prevent 126,000 unsuitable candidates from purchasing handguns. By this same year, Levin reports, more that 1.2 million total applicants had been denied the right to purchase a gun from a federally licensed dealer because of past convictions for violent offenses, a history of mental illness or past or standing restraining orders. (Levin, p. 1)

These application rejections occur under the terms of the Firearm Inquiry Statistics (FIST) Program. Here, "data are collected directly from state agencies conducting background checks and from local checking agencies and include the number of firearm applications made to the agency, firearm applications rejected by the agency, and the reasons for rejection. Data." (BJS, p. 1) This data informs findings such as that by Senator Levin that 80% of all individuals rejected for handgun ownership are shown to have a serious criminal background or other truly compelling reason for rejection.

At first glance, this seems to suggest that both the Brady Act and its subordinate FIST program are successful in nature. However,…