More Guns Less Crime (28 page)

What Determines the Number of Permits Issued and What Is the Net Benefit from Issuing Another Permit?

The Number of Permits

The relationship between the percentage of the population with permits and the changes in crime rates is central to much of the debate over the right to carry. My previous work was based on the number of permits issued for counties in Oregon and Pennsylvania as well as on discussions with various government officials on what types of counties issued the most permits. The comparison across states assumed that what created the difference in permit rates across counties also applied across states. Some more state-level data have now become available on permit rates, but such data are still relatively scarce. In addition to Florida, Oregon,

and Pennsylvania, I have also acquired some annual permit-rate data up to 1996 for Alaska, Arizona, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming, though these states had these rules in effect for no more than a few years.

While these data are limited, they allow us to examine what factors determine permitting rates, which in turn lets us link the permitting rate to changes in crime. Permit prices, the amount of training required to get a permit, the length of time that permitting rules have been in effect, and the crime rate are all important factors in determining how many people will get permits. Permitting fees and prices charged for training courses are expected to reduce the number of permits issued, but another important cost of getting a permit is the time spent meeting the requirements. This is not to say that there are not also benefits from training (that is a separate issue), but in the narrow issue of how many permits will be issued, there is no doubt that longer training requirements discourage some people from getting permits.

What permitting rules are in place largely depends upon when the laws were first enacted. States that adopted right-to-carry laws more recently tend to have more restrictive licensing requirements. For example, the three states (Alaska, Arizona, and Texas) requiring at least ten hours of training adopted their rules during the last few years of the sample, and Arizona is the only right-to-carry state that requires additional training when permits are renewed. Six of the eight states with permitting fees of at least $100 have also enacted the law during the last few years. This raises the concern that the drops in crime from the passage of right-to-carry laws may be smaller in the states that have most recently adopted these laws simply because they have issued fewer permits.

Based on state-level data, table 9.2 shows the impact of permit fees, training requirements, and how long (in years) the law has been in effect. Because the evidence indicates that the number of new permits is likely to trail off over time, the estimates include both the number of years the law has been in effect and the number of years squared. Fees and training requirements were first investigated without square terms. Notice that only a small fraction of the population gets permits, ranging from less than 1 percent to 6 percent. With that in mind, the regression results show that for each $10 increase in fees, the population getting permits is reduced by about one half of a percentage point. And requiring five hours of training (rather than none) reduces the number of permits by about two-thirds of a percentage point. In a typical state without any fees or training requirements, the percentage of the population with permits would grow from about 3 percent to a little less than 6 percent after a decade.

Table 9.2 What determines the rate at which people obtain permits?

Percentage of the state population with permits

-.5%*

6.1%*

*The result is significant at the 1 percent level for a two-tailed t-test.

I also ran more complicated specifications including squared terms for fees and training requirements. They give similar results: fees discourage people from obtaining permits over almost the entire range (until fees go over $130, which is near the highest fee in the sample—$140 for Texas). Anecdotal evidence from newspapers indicates that yet another factor is important: the fear of an attack. Thus, crime and multiple-victim public shootings increase gun sales and concealed-handgun permits. 16 Other variables, such as violent-crime rates, murder rates, the number of multiple-victim public shootings, or the death rate from those attacks, are also important for determining how many people get permits, but they do not alter the impact of the previously mentioned variables. Each additional multiple-victim public shooting increases a state's number of permits by about two-tenths of a percentage point, and each additional person who is killed in such a shooting (per 1 million people living in a state) increases handgun permits by one-tenth of a percentage point.

The Crime Rate and the Estimated Number of Concealed Handguns

The above estimates allow us to revisit the impact of permits and crime rates. While the time-series data on permits issued in different states are relatively short, we do have detailed information on the factors that help determine the number of permits (the fees, training requirements, and how long the law has been in effect). The results from the specification shown in table 9.2 were used to construct "predicted values." Constructing a predicted percentage of a state's population with permits allows us to do more than relying on how crime rates change over time or on the anecdotal evidence I obtained from surveying different state permitting agencies.

These new results using state-level data, shown in table 9.3, indicate that violent-crime rates fell across the board as more permits were issued, with the largest drop occurring for robberies. These results correspond closely to the diagrams reported in figures 4.6—4.9 and 7.1—7.4, which indicate that robberies and rapes are most dramatically affected by the number of years that right-to-carry laws are in effect. The coefficients imply that for every 1,000 additional people with permits, there are 0.3 fewer murders, 2.4 fewer rapes, 21 fewer robberies, and 14.1 fewer aggravated assaults. 17 On the other hand, with the exception of burglary, property crime remained statistically unchanged as more people obtained permits.

Would society benefit from more people getting permits? As already noted, obtaining a permit costs money and takes time. Carrying around a gun is also inconvenient, and many states impose penalties if the gun does not remain concealed. 18 On the positive side, permit holders benefit from having the gun for protection and might also come to the rescue of others. But perhaps just as important are the benefits to general crime deterrence produced by concealed-carry laws, for they also help protect others indirectly, as criminals do not know which people can defend themselves until they attack. This raises the real risk that too few people will get permits, as permit holders personally bear all these costs but produce large benefits for others.

Whether too few permits are being issued depends on how the crime rate changes as more and more permits are issued and whether it is the permit holder or the general public who primarily reaps the benefit from more concealed carry.

The impact of increasing the number of permits on crime is shown in table 9.3, column 1. However, the impact does not need to be constant as more people get permits. Indeed, there may well exist what economists call "diminishing returns"—that is, the crime-reducing benefits from another person getting a permit falls as more people get permits. The reason behind this is twofold: first, those most at risk could be the first to get permits; second, once one adult in a public setting (e.g., a store) has a concealed handgun, the additional benefit from a second or third person being armed should be relatively smaller.

But it is also conceivable that the probability that a victim can defend herself must rise above a certain threshold before it does much to discourage criminals. For instance, if only a few women brandish guns, a would-be rapist may believe that a defensive use is simply an exception and go after another woman. Perhaps if a large enough percentage of women defend themselves, the would-be rapist would decide that the risk to himself is too high.

Table 9.3 Using the predicted percent of the population with permits to explain the changes in different crime rates for state data

One-percentage-point change in the share of the state population with permits

(i)

Pattern when a quadratic term is added for the percent of the population with permits (2)

Number by which total crimes are reduced when an additional 1 percent of the population obtains permits in 1996, using the estimates from column 1 for states that had a right-to-carry law in effect by that year (3)

Violent crime

Robbery

-7%*

Murder -4%***

Rape -7%*

-13.6%*

Drop reaches its maximum when

23% of the population has

permits

Drop reaches its maximum when

&% of the population has permits

Drop is increasing at an

increasing rate as more people

get permits

Drop tapers off, but so slowly

that it is still falling when 100

percent of the population has

permits

432 lives saved 3,862 fewer rapes

35,014 fewer robberies

Aggravated assault

Property

crime

Burglary

Larceny Auto theft

-5%**

-2.6%*** -10%*

-.6% -3%

Drop reaches its maximum when

6 percent of the population has

permits

Drop continues at a constant rate

Drop is increasing at an

increasing rate as more people

get permits

No significant pattern

Drop reaches its maximum when

3 percent of the population has

permits

28,562 fewer aggravated assaults

144,227 fewer burglaries

27,922 fewer larcenies 21,254 fewer auto thefts

Note: Using the National Institute of Justice estimates of what crime costs victims to estimate the net savings from 1 percent more of the population obtaining permits (or of each additional permit) in 1998 dollars, the cost is reduced by $3.45 billion ($2,516 per permit). *The result is significant at the 1 percent level for a two-tailed t-test. **The result is significant at the 5 percent level for a two-tailed t-test. ***The result is significant at the 15 percent level for a two-tailed t-test.

One can test for diminishing returns from more permits by using a squared term for the percentage of the population with permits. The results (shown in column 2) indicate that right-to-carry states experience additional drops in all the violent-crime categories when more permits are issued. For murder, rape, and robbery, all states experience further reductions in crime from issuing more permits, though diminishing returns appear for murder and aggravated assault. (Only one state—Pennsylvania—approaches the number of permits beyond which there would be little further reduction in aggravated assaults from issuing more permits.) An important word of caution is in order here. These particular estimates of the percentage of the population that minimizes crime are rather speculative, because they represent predictions outside the range for which observed permit levels are available. (We thus cannot use these results to predict with confidence what would happen if a state got up to, say, 8 percent having permits.) Still, there is little doubt that issuing additional permits beyond what we have today lowers crime.

Chapter 5 employed county-level permit data from Oregon and Pennsylvania and used the estimated victimization costs from the National Institute of Justice to determine the net benefit to society from issuing an additional permit. Similar estimates can be made for the thirty-one states issuing permits in 1996: each one-percentage-point increase in the population obtaining permits is associated with a $3.45 billion annual net saving to crime victims (in 1998 dollars). Each additional permit produces a total societal benefit of $2,500 per year. While this estimate is smaller than my earlier figures for Oregon and Pennsylvania, the total benefits greatly exceed the total costs of getting a permit. In other words, the numbers suggest that not enough permits are being issued.

The results also indicate that permitting fees are highly detrimental. For each $10 increase in fees, the percentage of the population with permits falls by one half of one percentage point. For the thirty-one states with right-to-carry laws, this increases victimization costs by $1.7 billion. The large effect from higher permitting fees might be due to the poorest and most vulnerable being especially discouraged from obtaining a permit. Blacks living in higher-crime urban areas benefit disproportionately from concealed-handgun permits. High fees are more likely to deter individuals from carrying guns when those individuals are poor. When fees are high, there may be a smaller crime-reduction benefit from right-to-carry laws even if the same percentage of the population were to obtain permits.

To test this, I reestimated the relationship between predicted permits and crime by also including the direct impact of permit fees on the crime rate. 19 The regressions for violent crime, murder, robbery, and aggravated

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assault all indicate that, holding constant the percentage of the population with permits, higher fees greatly reduce the benefit from right-to-carry laws. For example, the drop in robberies from one percent of the population having permits is about two percentage points smaller when the fee is raised from $10 to $50.

Updating the Evidence on Who Benefits from Permits

While the preceding results relied on state-level data, we know from previous work (already presented in this book) that different parts of states obtained greatly varying benefits from issuing permits. This finding is confirmed with the new, updated data. But I will here discuss a somewhat different specification, linking the changes in crime more closely to the issuing of more permits. The percentage of the population with permits is interacted with the percentage of the adult population in a county that is over sixty-four years of age, the population density per square mile, the percentage that is black, the percentage that is female, and per-capita personal income. The earlier interactions in chapter 4, reported with county population, are skipped over here because they again produce results that are extremely similar to the regressions with an interaction for population density. 20