You make good points. I remember the time when “Saturday Night Specials” were the objects of special contempt and the main target of gun control advocates, which also had the support of my PD’s across America. It still makes far more sense to go after large capacity pistols than anything else. Even from a “Second Amendment” viewpoint, a handgun is useless as a weapon of war — any officer who wants to survive combat will grab themselves a rifle rather than use their standard issue pistol — so from a “well-regulated militia” standpoint, it ought to be much easier to regulate pistols before rifles. But leaving that aside, I think the FBI statistics really stand on their own.
As for the normalization of the data, sure you’re right: there is never just one way to look at data. I wanted to normalize in order to isolate the impact or lack of impact for a given piece of legislation, but the overall trend is also critical and I do treat more fully in another article. But since I’m attempting to write an article that people will be interested in reading and not a doctoral thesis, I try to limit the amount of number crunching and exposition in these.
Excellent point that I overlooked about the boom in sales and registrations prior to the ban taking effect; not something I looked at, but worth looking at as well. Also the concentration of firearms: the distribution is not even, of course and I could at some point go down to a state and even county level for a more detailed analysis (though these have been done, there is literature out there on this type of modeling).
