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A Reassessment of the D.C. Gun Law: Some Cautionary Notes on the Use of Interrupted Time Series Designs for Policy Impact Assessment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Chester L. Britt ,
Gary Kleck  and
David J. Bordua
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Interrupted time series designs are commonly used to assess the impact of gun control legislation, as well as other legal and policy changes. Three common problems in the use of these designs—(1) selection of an appropriate control series, (2) specification of the intervention model, and (3) specification of the time series studied—raise questions about the validity of the conclusions reached in research on the impact of gun control. We illustrate these problems with a critical reassessment of Loftin et al.'s (1991) evaluation of the 1976 District of Columbia Gun Law. We then use monthly homicide data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Center for Health Statistics to illustrate how careful consideration of these three design issues results in a significantly different conclusion about the effectiveness of the District of Columbia Gun Law.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , 1996 , pp. 361 - 380
Copyright
Copyright © 1996 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

We would like to thank Michael Gottfredson, Richard McCleary, and David McDowall for their input on earlier versions. A fuller version of this paper was presented at the 1993 Annual Meetings for the American Society of Criminology, Phoenix, AZ, and can be obtained from Gary Kleck (Kleck, Britt, & Bordua 1993); write to him at School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306.

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