Increase Oversight and Regulation of Gun Manufacturers

Before bringing a product to market, manufacturers must contract with a federally certified laboratory to test its product for safety. The laboratory will ensure that the product doesn’t pose an electrical or mechanical hazard and guarantee that the packaging is safe and that the product itself doesn’t include toxic metals and can be used safely by customers. Once the laboratory has completed its work, the manufacturer can then certify that, based on the test results, the product complies with all mandated safety rules.

Consumer advocates have long applauded these guidelines, arguing that they have prevented numerous injuries and saved countless lives.

But the description above applies to toy manufacturers, not gunmakers. In fact, cars, toys, and aspirin all have to meet mandatory safety standards. Guns do not. Many guns made in America do not go through safety testing to ensure they include the most basic safety features.¹ No federal agency oversees how firearms are designed or built. Just seven states and the District of Columbia have enacted laws to address federally unregulated domestic junk guns. California, Massachusetts, and New York have the most comprehensive design and safety standards for handguns. Why does this matter? An October 2012 study from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy Research found that improved safety standards might prevent many unintentional, accidental shootings, which killed 4,000 Americans and injured over 95,000 between 2005 and 2010.

Highlighting a particularly egregious example of gun manufacturer negligence, a CNBC investigation in 2010 found that for decades Remington Arms secretly considered recalling its rifles due to a design flaw. Customers bought rifles that would discharge even if no one pulled the trigger; twenty-four people died and one hundred were injured as a result. Remington finally redesigned its trigger in 2007, but with no federal oversight, it was able to resist doing this for years and keep the claims under wraps.²

Gunmakers do not have to reveal exactly what they manufacture, in what quantities they manufacture it, or how they distribute their products. This lack of information makes it harder—almost impossible—for policy makers to understand the industry, count the number of guns in circulation, and identify where they are.

We should not be relying on an honor system in which gun manufacturers can simply police themselves. Firearm makers must be required to meet tough new transparency standards in reporting what products they manufacture, how many firearms they make every single year, and where those products are distributed. They should also be required to serialize additional parts of the gun and shell casings to allow law enforcement agencies to easily identify the weapon if it is used to commit a crime. Currently, only the frame or receiver must be marked, making it easy to file off the number. Many foreign manufacturers serialize other components, like barrels and magazines, but U.S. manufacturers do only what is required and no more. We as Americans deserve better.

The gun industry should be required to meet stiff safety standards and be subject to oversight by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, just like the toys I described above. The CPSC protects the public from unsafe and dangerous products through public safety warnings and recalls and it must expand its mandate to include guns. Firearms were left out of its purview by former Michigan representative John Dingell. His wife, Representative Debbie Dingell, who now holds his seat, has since introduced a bill in Congress to include firearms in the commission’s mandate.

The truth is, such oversight is more important now than ever before. Firearm manufacturers, in an effort to improve market share, are producing new products and militarized firearm accessories that may actually be making guns more dangerous. These changes are designed to excite an already saturated customer base as gun ownership rates are shrinking and the gun supply is increasingly concentrated in the hands of fewer people.

The industry is producing devices that mimic fully automatic fire; AR and AK pistols, which are guns that mimic short-barreled rifles; and pistol stabilizing braces, which are being used to function as a shoulder stock, transforming the pistol into a short-barreled rifle, a weapon currently restricted under federal law. Since these pistols fire rifle calibers, their rounds travel three times faster than pistol rounds, penetrate common police body armor, and create devastating wounds. These new firearms and accessories are making crime more deadly. In Chicago, researchers have noticed that the average weapon caliber used in everyday gun violence has been going up and that the number of people killed with high-velocity pistols has increased substantially. As a result, the percentage of people who die after being shot is on the rise. In prior decades, the trend was moving in the opposite direction as medical care improved. Weapon caliber has now caught up with medical advances.

These new weapons do not technically violate the National Firearms Act of 1934 and other measures that regulate machine guns, silencers, short-barreled shotguns, and short-barreled rifles, but gunmakers are exploiting new technology and finding new loopholes in existing law in order to sell more-lethal weapons, weapons that Congress intended to stringently regulate and tax. We must crack down on this behavior by: (1) empowering the government to enforce the existing restrictions; (2) regulating new products designed to get around the laws; (3) prohibiting the sale, purchase, possession, or use of ammunition that poses a particular threat to public safety and has no sport or hunting utility; and (4) ensuring that all products meet safety standards set by the experts at the Consumer Product Safety Commission.