The Effectiveness of The Brandy Act in Reducing Gun Violence in the United States

The Federal Policy Analysis and Critique Paper
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The Federal Policy Analysis and Critique Paper
Introduction
The discourse over gun policies in the United States (US) has been characterized by uncertainties triggered by recurrent mass shootings within civilian settings. For instance, the massacre of twenty schoolchildren in Connecticut in 2012 triggered a nationwide debate about federal gun policies. Nevertheless, legislation seeking to ban semiautomatic weapons was rejected by Senate despite widespread public support for such measures. The US has recorded the worst gun violence in recent years. In 2020, approximately 20,000 Americans lost their lives due to gun violence, the highest statistic in over two decades. It is anticipated that the trend will persist into the future if nothing is done in terms of reforms in the current gun control policies. Proponents of the gun control policies affirm that the US needs to learn from the experiences of its developed democratic peers that have enacted effective and tighter restrictions to stop gun violence. This report evaluates the effectiveness of the Brandy Act in reducing gun violence in the US via background check requirements.
Problem Description
In order to contextualize the problem of ineffective gun control policies in the US, it is crucial to recognize that the nation records gun homicide rates 25 percent higher than its affluent peers, and gun-related suicide remains eight times higher in comparison to other nations (Ashfaq, 2021). Despite a record decline in the rate of gun-related deaths in other wealthy democratic countries recently, US rates have escalated. Unfortunately, the US federal laws made it easier for Americans to buy and own firearms without appropriate historical and contextual checks. In this way, thousands of people have lost their lives in America due to high gun accessibility that has increased gun violence. In 2018, over 393 million firearms were owned by civilians in the US, translating to 120.5 guns for every 100 residents (Ashfaq, 2021). This implied that more guns were in circulation compared to the US population. Noteworthy, many of the firearms in the US were in the hands of white men.
In 2020, over 41,500 individuals died because of gun violence, out of which over 23,000 people died because of suicide; the peak statistic of gun-related death annually within the past two decades (Ashfaq, 2021). The rising gun violence problem disproportionately impacts brown and black communities within the lower socioeconomic strata. In this vein, African Americans constitute over 68 percent of the homicide victims within bigger cities, albeit many of them being gun violence victims (Ashfaq, 2021).
Figure 1: Gun Ownership and Homicides in Selected Countries (Masters, 2021).
Analysis of the Brandy Act
The Brandy Act is a federal policy enacted in 1994 to control the buying and ownership of guns by individuals with criminal contact with the judicial system. It can be deduced that the Brandy Act draws its tenets from psychology and behavioral economics, which indicate that delaying firearm purchase, even for the short notice, potentiates an effective policy instrument. Visce...