CORVALLIS, Ore. – Oregon voters' narrow 2022 approval of a referendum designed to limit gun purchases has instead resulted in thousands more firearms in the state than there otherwise would have been, a new analysis suggests.
Measure 114's proponents wanted the state to require a permit for gun purchases and to prohibit magazines that held more than 10 rounds. With support concentrated in urban counties, the measure passed by a margin of fewer than 25,000 votes, or 1.3 percentage points: 975,862 to 950,891.
A study published in the Journal of Public Economics shows that background checks, an indicator of firearm demand, rose nearly 14% in the runup to the election, then surged 157% after the measure passed.
Upon passage, Measure 114 faced multiple legal challenges that are still unresolved, and Oregon lawmakers this year passed legislation delaying the measure's implementation – if supporters win in court – until Jan. 1, 2028.
Researchers at Oregon State University, the University of Oregon and the National Bureau of Economic Research estimate that by 18 months post-election, an additional 63,000 background checks had taken place compared to the number that would have been conducted without the gun control effort.
Not every background check leads to a finalized purchase, OSU economist Katie Bollman notes, but some result in the purchase of multiple firearms.
"It's not particularly surprising that people go out and buy more guns when they have compelling reason to believe it's going to become harder to in the future," said Bollman, an assistant professor in OSU's College of Liberal Arts. "But the magnitude of the increase is pretty remarkable, as is the underlying dynamic driving it."
Bollman and her collaborators estimate that Measure 114's anticipatory effect on firearm purchasing was so strong that even if the measure eventually becomes law, it will take more than a year just to get the number of guns in Oregon back to what it would have been had the referendum effort never taken place.
"This makes it particularly notable that Measure 114 has not been implemented – there are more guns in Oregon after passing permit-to-purchase than we expected to have if it had not passed," she said.
Bollman notes that prior to this study, there hadn't been a great sense of how much anticipatory firearm buying is because people who already intended to buy a gun just bought it sooner, versus knowledge of an upcoming restriction inducing altogether new purchases. That distinction matters for a variety of reasons, she said, including how the effects of new regulations are interpreted once they're in place.
"If folks who were already planning to buy guns just act more quickly, then the anticipatory increase may not be that notable – the anticipation effect would wash out in a few months," she said. "However, that's not what we found. We found that passing the referendum resulted in new purchases."
Because the proposed Measure 114 restrictions were limited to Oregon, the economists were able to estimate both short- and longer-term consumer responses using other states as credible counterfactuals, Bollman added.
It's not possible, she said, to know exactly how many guns there are in Oregon. The state does not maintain a firearm registry, and Bollman avoids making estimates "because I can't give an informed one with any reasonable amount of precision."
According to research by the RAND Corporation, 44% of Oregon adults lived in a household with at least one firearm between 2007 and 2016. Oregon's population is 4.3 million, spread among 1.7 million households .
Statistics kept by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show there were 663 gun deaths in Oregon in 2024, the most recent year for which data are available. The total includes 120 homicides and 524 suicides.
Nationally, 44,447 people died from firearm-related injuries in 2024. Sixty-two percent of those deaths were suicides, compared to an 80% suicide rate in Oregon.
