A photo illustration depicting firearms.
Saskia Hatvany / OPB
In November 2022, Oregon voters narrowly passed a gun control measure that bans high-capacity gun magazines and requires safety training, completed background checks and permits for firearm purchases.
Measure 114 awaits a decision by the Oregon Supreme Court and if it’s upheld, the soonest it could take effect is January 2028.
The prospect of gun control restrictions nonetheless fueled a sharp demand in gun purchases in Oregon leading up to and following the Measure 114 referendum. That’s according to a new study by researchers from Oregon State University, the University of Oregon and the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Using background checks as a proxy for firearm purchases, the researchers found that background checks spiked nearly 160% in the two months after the passage of Measure 114. The researchers said the measure led to 63,000 more background checks in Oregon between October 2022 and March 2024 than would have otherwise been expected during this time.
Katie Bollman, an assistant professor in economics at OSU, joins us for more details.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed using AI tools and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Geoff Norcross: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Geoff Norcross, in for Dave Miller. Four years ago, Oregonians passed Measure 114. It included banning high-capacity magazines and requiring safety training, completed background checks and permits for firearm purchases. The measure is on hold while the Oregon Supreme Court takes a look, but its approval seems to have inspired a lot of Oregonians to buy a gun. Katie Bollman is an assistant professor of economics at Oregon State. She’s been studying this and she joins us now. Katie, welcome to Think Out Loud.
Katie Bollman: Thank you for having me.
Norcross: So the reason we think more people are buying guns is the number of background checks spiked after Measure 114 passed. Is that right?
Bollman: Yes, that’s correct. We don’t have any sort of a centralized way to be able to actually measure firearms transactions or individual purchases, but what we do know is that they move along with firearm-related background checks. So we’re able to use those data to get a good sense of what’s happening with firearm demand and firearm purchasing overall.
Norcross: Really, it is a 1-to-1 ratio? Well, I don’t know, maybe I’m using statistical terms that I shouldn’t, but can you draw a connection between the background checks and more people buying guns?
Bollman: Great question. So we can draw a connection, but not a 1-to-1 connection. Just kind of intuitively, a background check could be denied or somebody could change their mind before following through with the purchase, or you can have one background check with which you purchase more than one firearm. Because of that, we don’t expect it to be 1-to-1, but we do expect them to move together. So if we see that background checks increase by 100%, we expect that that pretty well reflects the percentage increase in the overall number of firearms as well.
And then we’re also able to do something a little bit less formal than most of our results in the paper, but say, you know what, we do have some numbers that we can use to try and tighten up that one-to-something comparison of background checks to firearm transactions. So we do that in our research as well, to try and put a concrete number on the number of firearms that we think we have in Oregon as a result of Measure 114 that otherwise wouldn’t have been sold.
Norcross: Well, based on that data, what is the concrete number? How many guns were bought in the last four years that otherwise we would not have expected?
Bollman: Yes, so our study goes from the month before the referendum took place, October of 2022, and we wrap it up in March of 2024. During that 18-month period, we see an excess of 63,000 background checks, which we say is probably going to be an underestimate of the overall number of firearms that were purchased. But it’s going to be probably closer to something like 66,000 additional firearms that we don’t expect would have been purchased in the absence of the Measure 114 referendum as it unfolded.
Norcross: Should we be surprised by that?
Bollman: I think so. It’s a pretty big number. I think the idea that folks go out and they buy firearms when they anticipate it’s going to be harder to buy them in the future, that basic intuition is one that I think a lot of folks have. But just how many firearms we’re talking about is larger than the types of spikes that we’ve seen in the past for things like highly publicized mass shootings, as well as the highly publicized Obama effect from that election, or even the peak of the spike in the COVID years.
Norcross: I’m curious why you think that is. Why do you think the spike is higher for Measure 114 than it would be for the Obama presidency or Sandy Hook?
Bollman: Yeah, so I think in those sorts of cases there’s a generalized anxiety that we don’t necessarily have present when we’re looking at Measure 114, but there’s also a less specific, imminent, binding constraint on future purchases. So the Obama effect, folks might have said, “well, maybe we’re going to see firearm policy change.” But that’s a little bit different than Measure 114, where we’re expecting, oh, on this date, firearm policy to meaningfully change in Oregon.
Norcross: Specific versus a generalized anxiety – that’s the difference I hear you saying.
Bollman: Yes. I should note that I’m a simple economist, so that’s a little outside of the data that I can look at, but I think that that’s one kind of plausible explanation for something that characterizes the difference between those lower peaks and the really large spike that we see with Measure 114.
Norcross: Do you see regional or county differences in the number of background checks that took place during this time?
Bollman: Yes. We do kind of break things out, separating counties based on whether they voted in favor or in opposition to Measure 114. And I think one really interesting thing is that we see that these gun-buying increases were widespread. So we see them both in the counties that were really strongly in favor of Measure 114 and those that were opposed. With that said, on a per-capita or a per-person basis, we see the biggest increases in the places that were most opposed to Measure 114.
Norcross: If Measure 114 had gone into effect soon after its passage and there wasn’t a court challenge, do you think that might have affected gun purchase sales in Oregon?
Bollman: What we see from other states that have implemented permit-to-purchase is that it does reduce the number of new purchases, after those sorts of policies are implemented. So I think that’s likely what we would have seen in Oregon as well, is some sort of a reduction in the overall number of firearms sales.
Norcross: You mentioned other permit-to-purchase restrictions that happened in other states. Is there an example that you can point to?
Bollman: I guess one of the canonical examples of this is actually moving in the other direction and looking at Missouri, which repealed permit-to-purchase and had kind of the opposite effect of what you would expect to see if you implemented a new permit-to-purchase program. People bought more guns.
Norcross: Really? The gun sales went down?
Bollman: I’m sorry, the gun sales went up when permit-to-purchase was repealed.
Norcross: Oh, I see what you’re saying. Tell me more about this study. What was the spark for doing it?
Bollman: I think partly this came about [because] myself, my co-authors – Ben Hanson, Garrett Stanford, Ed Rubin down at the University of Oregon – we were all in Oregon at the time in which Measure 114 was on the ballot and…
Norcross: You have just got into town, right?
Bollman: I had just gotten into town. So now there’s this thing that many people are talking a lot about. We’re looking at the world around us, and we are seeing this really interesting and important market, and an opportunity to kind of study it, and better understand for ourselves and for others what’s happening with firearm demand in Oregon and the effects of Measure 114.
So there’s one piece of it where we’re economists and we see this interesting and important incentive in this demand change, so we want to study that. I think, also, there’s just this tie in that people feel very strongly about firearms and their social implications of firearms. So I think it’s a particularly important thing to study and to understand these demand dynamics.
Norcross: What’s been the reaction to the study?
Bollman: It’s interesting. I think it’s somewhat mixed. I think there’s a group that says, well, we kind of knew this. We might not have known the exact numbers, but you’re not telling us anything new. And I think that’s a very reasonable reaction. This general pattern of behavior is kind of what you might expect to see, that people went out and they bought more firearms. And then we’re able to add some precision around the numbers that we’re talking about when we talk about that sort of behavior change or that sort of consumption pattern change.
I think always when we talk about firearms, it’s going to bring up a lot for people. This is a very charged topic. So I think there’s also always going to be some general anxieties, talking about those generalized anxieties. Always some generalized anxieties when someone comes out and is studying firearms.
Norcross: Your study period ended in March 2024, so there’s been some time since then. Do you have a sense of what the picture is like now?
Bollman: That’s a great question. We think that the Measure 114 effects have really kind of tapered off, so we think we’re past the point where that referendum is actively affecting buying dynamics at this moment in time. At the same time, we do have national trends in firearms that I think Oregon plays into as well. So yeah, I don’t have a robust sense of anything particularly interesting in the Oregon firearm demand space since then, but I think we’re past that bulk of the referendum-related buying effects.
Norcross: Yeah, but the Oregon Supreme Court is going to come out with a ruling at some point, so the issue will get hot again. Do you think gun sales in Oregon might change if the state supreme court upholds Measure 114?
Bollman: I think that would be really kind of an opportunity to see what we observed in this first iteration of it potentially happening again in the future. So there’s some conversation of maybe there’s going to be a longer time period in which people can kind of go out and buy these guns. There was a one-month time period for the referendum itself. If it’s a longer time period, maybe we won’t see the same height of that peak. But I think it’s very likely, from what we’ve found, that we would expect to see more anticipatory purchases of firearms if Measure 114 is upheld and is going to be enacted in the future.
Norcross: If it’s overturned?
Bollman: And if it’s overturned, we have a little bit less evidence of folks responding in the opposite direction and buying fewer firearms. There is, nationally, a discussion that’s sometimes termed the “Trump slump” and the idea that people do potentially taper some of their firearm demand when they think that it’s likely they can purchase one in the future. There’s a little bit less evidence around just how prevalent that is, and it’s a little bit hard to nail down what exactly is driving those reductions in purchasing when it’s kind of a complicated world and a lot of things are changing within it.
Norcross: OPB’s Troy Brynelson spoke this week to Amie Wexler, the executive director for the gun violence prevention organization Alliance for a Safe Oregon, for his reporting on this study. Wexler said, “We’re looking at a long horizon here of keeping Oregonians safe. There may be more guns in homes right now, but we know Measure 114 will save lives when it’s implemented.” And I’m wondering, from your perspective, from somebody who’s had their head in the data for four years, if you think she has reason to be optimistic like that.
Bollman: Yeah, I think that’s pretty consistent with what we’re finding here, right? What we’re showing is that there’s this period of high responsiveness to these imminent changes in firearm demand, in which there was this big increase in purchases that then kind of tapered off once the first judicial stay came out. But we also would be expecting that if permit-to-purchase were implemented in Oregon, that would reduce the number of firearms in the future.
So, in that world, we would expect that the Measure 114 effects on overall firearm access would be delayed by the anticipatory effects rather than erased. I think that’s fairly consistent with what she’s describing there. Looking into the long term, it’s not such a large increase in firearm demand that permit-to-purchase will never kind of undo the excess demand that was created by the anticipatory behavior.
Norcross: You’re an economist. I mean, you could put your head in all kinds of data sets. What is it about firearms that you find interesting?
Bollman: I think it’s a good question. It’s not the only thing that I find interesting, so I should note that I work on a variety of things that are largely related to public safety, to policing and to other things that touch the courts. These are legal firearms sales that we’re talking about within this paper, but there are downstream implications of those for some of these things that show up in the courts that I study as well.
So, as an economist, I think whenever you have a large change in any sort of a market, it’s something that draws our attention a little bit. But when you do something that has this same sort of an implication for the types of things that I work on later on in the process, it becomes particularly interesting. And I’m in Oregon, right? This is a referendum that showed up in my mailbox, so I’m interested just to understand the world around me, and this has been a part of it.
Norcross: What do you think is the next thing to study about this issue?
Bollman: I think there’s a few different directions we can take it into the future. We feel that this project is fairly complete in and of itself, but as you pointed out before, there may be additional changes or non-changes and publicized non-changes on the policy horizon for firearm policy in Oregon. I think it’d be very interesting to take some of these tools and techniques that we used to study the referendum and bring them into the future with these future iterations.
Norcross: So more to come, maybe. Katie Bollman, thank you so much for the time. I appreciate it.
Bollman: All right, thank you.
Norcross: Katie Bollman is an assistant professor of economics at Oregon State University.
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