More Guns Less Crime (46 page)

Total deaths and injuries per 100,000 population

Average annual change for years after adoption

of the law -0.04*

Average annual change for years before adoption

of the law 0.015*

Arrest rate for Murder —0.0003

*Statistically significant at least at the 10 percent level for a two-tailed t-test Note: numbers are negative; years furthest beyond adoption are the largest

7. See appendix 4 for the means and standard deviations of the variables used in these regressions.

8. Again, this is stating that a one-standard-deviation change in arrest rates explains more than 15 percent of a one-standard-deviation change in crime rates.

9. Running the regressions for all Pennsylvania counties (not just those with more than 200,000 people) produced similar signs for the coefficient for the change in concealed-handgun permits, though the coefficients were no longer statistically significant for violent crimes, rape, and aggravated assault. Alan Krug, who provided us with the Pennsylvania handgun-permit data, told us that one reason for the large increase in concealed-handgun permits in some rural counties was that people used the guns for

NOTES TO PAGES 106-117/285

hunting. He told us that the number of permits issued in these low-population, rural counties tended to increase most sharply in the fall around hunting season. If people were in fact getting large numbers of permits in low-population counties (which already have extremely low crime rates) for some reason other than crime, it would be more difficult to pick up the deterrent effect of concealed handguns on crime that was occurring in the larger counties.

10. A one-standard-deviation change in conviction rates explains 4 to 20 percent of a one-standard-deviation change in the corresponding crime rates.

11. I reran these regressions using the natural logs of the arrest and conviction rates, and I consistently found statistically larger and even economically more important effects for the arrest rates than for the conviction rates.

12. For example, see Dan M. Kahan, "What Do Alternative Sanctions Mean?" University of Chicago Law Review 63 (1996): 591-653.

13. See John R. Lott, Jr., "The Effect of Conviction on the Legitimate Income of Criminals," Economics Letters 34 (Dec. 1990): 381—85; John R. Lott, Jr., "An Attempt at Measuring the Total Monetary Penalty from Drug Convictions: The Importance of an Individual's Reputation," Journal of Legal Studies 21 (Jan. 1992): 159-87; John R. Lott, Jr., "Do We Punish High-Income Criminals Too Heavily?" Economic Inquiry 30 (Oct. 1992): 583-608.

14. Put differently, six of the specifications imply that a one-standard-deviation change in the number of concealed-handgun permits explains at least 8 percent of a one-standard-deviation change in the corresponding crime rates.

15. Philip Heymann, a former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration and currently a law professor at Harvard University, wrote, "None of this [the drop in crime rates] is the result of... the Brady Act (for most guns were never bought by youth from licensed gun dealers)." See "The Limits of Federal Crime-Fighting," Washington Post, Jan. 5, 1997, p. C7.

16. For a discussion of externalities (both benefits and costs) from crime, see Kermit Daniel and John R. Lott, Jr., "Should Criminal Penalties Include Third-Party Avoidance Costs?" Journal of Legal Studies 24 (June 1995): 523-34.

17. Alix M. Freedman, "Tinier, Deadlier Pocket Pistols Are in Vogue," Wall Street Journal, Sept. 12, 1996, pp. Bl, B16.

18. One hundred and eighty-two million people lived in states without these laws in 1991, so the regressions would have also implied nine more accidental deaths from handguns in that year.

19. Given the very small number of accidental deaths from handguns in the United States, the rate of such deaths in the vast majority of counties is zero, and the last two columns of table 5.6 again use Tobit regressions to deal with this problem. Limitations in statistical packages, however, prevented me from being able to control for all the county dummies, and I opted to rerun these regressions with only state dummy variables.

20. For example, see Nicholas D. Kristof, "Guns: One Nation Bars, the Other Requires," New York Times, Mar. 10, 1996, sec. 4, p. 3. For some evidence on international gun ownership rates see Munday and Stevenson, Guns and Violence (1996): 30.

21. See Ian Ayres and Steven Levitt, "Measuring Positive Externalities from Unobserv-able Victim Precaution: An Empirical Analysis of Lojack," NBER working paper 5928 (1997); and John Donohue and Peter Siegelman, "Is the United States at the Optimal Rate of Crime?" Journal of Legal Studies 27 (Jan. 1998).

22. See notes 12 and 13 above.

CHAPTER SIX

1. Isaac Ehrlich, "Participation in Illegitimate Activities: A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation," Journal of Political Economy 81 (1973): 548—51. Except for the political variables, my specification accords fairly closely with at least the spirit of Ehrlich's specification,

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though some of my variables, like the demographic breakdowns, are much more detailed, and I have a few other measures that were not available to him.

2. See also Robert E. McCormick and Robert Tollison, "Crime on the Court," Journal of Political Economy 92 (Apr. 1984): 223-35, for a novel article testing the endogeneity of the "arrest rate" in the context of basketball penalties.

3. These last two variables are measured at the state level.

4. Phil Cook suggested this addition to me. In a sense, this is similar to Ehrlich's specification, except that the current crime rate is broken down into its lagged value and the change between the current and previous periods. See Ehrlich, "Participation in Illegitimate Activities," p. 557.

5. The natural logs of the rates for violent crime and property crime were used.

6. These estimates are known as two-stage least squares.

7. Ehrlich raises the concern that the types of two-stage, least-squares estimates discussed above might still be affected by spurious correlation if the measurement errors for the crime rate were serially correlated over time. To account for this, I reestimated the first-stage regressions predicting the arrest rate without the lagged crime rate, which made the estimated results for the nondiscretionary law dummy even more negative and more statistically significant than those already shown. See Ehrlich, "Participation in Illegitimate Activities," p. 552 n. 46.

8. Still another approach would be to estimate what are known as Tobit regressions, but unfortunately no statistical package is available that allows me both to control for all the different county dummy variables and to use the Tobit procedure.

CHAPTER SEVEN

1. The Violence Policy Center grew out of the National Coalition to Ban Handguns.

2. Douglas Weil, the research director for Handgun Control, Inc., has publicly disagreed with the claim that most gun-control advocates initially refused to comment on my study. In a letter to the Washington Times, Weil wrote,

The Washington Times editorial ("Armed and Safer," Aug. 14) is misinformed and misguided. The Times falsely claims that gun-control proponents "initially refused to read" John Lott's and David Mustard's study of the impact of laws regarding the right to carry concealed guns, and that I attacked the researchers' motivations rather than challenge the study "on the merits." This charge is untrue.

One look at the study would prove the Times wrong. On the title page of the study, several pro-gun-control researchers are credited for their comments "on the merits" of the study. Included in this list are David McDowall, a criminologist at the University of Maryland; Philip Cook, an economist at Duke University; and myself, research director for the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence.

Upon reviewing the study, I found Mr. Lott's methodology to be seriously flawed. I told Mr. Lott that his study did not adequately control for the whole range of ways that state and local governments attempt to lower the crime rate. In Oregon, for example, the same legislation that made it easier to carry a concealed handgun included one of the toughest new handgun-purchase laws in the country—a 15-day waiting period and fingerprint-background check on all purchases. ...

I gladly shared my critique of this study with Mr. Lott and will now reiterate it here; as someone fully credentialed to evaluate Mr. Lott's and Mr. Mustard's work, I would have recommended that the paper be rejected. (See Douglas Weil, "A Few Thoughts on the Study of Handgun Violence and Gun Control," Washington Times, Aug. 22, 1996, p. A16.)

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While it is true that I thanked Mr. Weil in my paper for a comment that he made, his single comment was nothing like what his letter to the Times claimed. Before he explained his concerns to the press, he and I had no discussions about whether I had controlled for "ways that state and local governments attempt to lower the crime rate," possibly because my study not only controls for arrest and conviction rates, prison sentences, the number of police officers and police payroll, but also waiting periods and criminal penalties for using a gun in the commission of a crime.

Mr. Weil's sole comment to me came after two previous telephone calls over a month and a half in which Mr. Weil had said that he was too busy to give me any comments. His sole comment on August 1 was that he was upset that I had cited a study by a professor, Gary Kleck, with whom Weil disagreed. I attempted to meet this unusual but minor criticism by rewriting the relevant sentence on the first page in a further attempt to dispassionately state the alternative hypotheses.

Mr. Weil's claims are particularly difficult to understand in light of a conversation that I had with him on August 5. After hearing him discuss my paper on the news, I called him to say how surprised I was to hear about his telling the press that the paper was "fundamentally flawed" when the only comment that he had given me was on the reference to Kleck. Mr. Weil then immediately demanded to know whether it was true that I had thanked him for giving comments on the paper. He had heard from people in the news media who had seen a draft with his name listed among those thanked. (On August 1,1 had added his name to the list of people who had given comments, and when the news of the paper suddenly broke on August 2 with the story in USA Today, it was this new version that had been faxed to the news media.) He wanted to know if I was trying to "embarrass" him with others in the gun-control community, and he insisted that had not given me any comments. I said that I had only done it to be nice, and I mentioned the concern that he raised about the reference to Kleck. Weil then demanded that I "immediately remove [his] name" from the paper.

3. This was not my only experience with Ms. Glick. On August 8, 1996, six days after the events of August 2 described above, I appeared with her on MSNBC. After I tried to make an introductory statement setting out my findings, Ms. Glick attacked me for having my study funded by "gun manufacturers." She claimed that I was a "shill" for the gun manufactures and that it was important that I be properly identified as not being an objective academic. She also claimed that there were many serious problems with the paper. Referring to the study, she asserted that it was a fraud.

I responded by saying that these were very serious charges and that if she had some evidence, she should say what it was. I told her that I didn't think she had any such evidence, and that if she didn't, we should talk about the issues involved in the study.

At this point the moderator broke in and said to Ms. Glick that he agreed that these were very serious charges, and he asked her what evidence she had for her statements. Glick responded by saying that she had lots of evidence and that it was quite obvious to her that this study had been done to benefit gun manufacturers.

The moderator then asked her to comment further on her claim that there were serious problems with the study, and she stated that one only had to go to page 2 before finding a problem. Her concern was that I had used data for Florida that was a year and a half old. The moderator then asked her why this was a problem, since I couldn't be expected to use data that was, say, as recent as last week. Ms. Glick responded by saying that a lot of things could have changed since the most recent data were available. I then mentioned that I had obtained more recent data since the study had been written and that the pattern of people not using permitted guns improperly had held true from October 1987 to December 31, 1995.

A more recent exchange that I had with the Violence Policy Center's President, Josh Sugarmann, on MSNBC on February 24, 1997, involved the same accusations.

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4. Douglas Weil, from the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, a division of Handgun Control, wrote the following to the Washington Times: "Given that Mr. Lott has published 70 papers in peer-reviewed journals, it is curious that he has chosen a law review for his research on concealed-gun-carrying laws" (Washington Times, Aug. 22, 1996, p. A16).

5. Scott Harris, "To Build a Better America, Pack Heat," Los Angeles Times, Jan. 9, 1997, p. Bl. In many ways, my study was indeed fortunate for the coverage that it received. It appears that no other study documenting the ability of guns to deter crime has received the same level of coverage. MediaWatch, a conservative organization tracking the content of television news programs, reviewed every gun-control story on four evening shows (ABC's World News Tonight, CBS's Evening News, CNN's The World Today, and NBC's Nightly News) and three morning broadcasts (ABC's Good Morning America, CBS's This Morning, and NBC's Today) from July 1,1995 through June 30,1997. MediaWatch categorized news stories in the following way: "Analysts counted the number of pro- and anti-gun-control statements by reporters in each story. Pieces with a disparity of greater than 1.5 to 1 were categorized as either for or against gun control. Stories closer than the ratio were deemed neutral. Among statements recorded as pro-gun control: violent crime occurs because of guns, not criminals, and gun control prevents crime. Categorized as arguments against gun control: gun control would not reduce crime; that criminals, not guns are the problem; Americans have a constitutional right to keep and bear arms; right-to-carry concealed weapons laws caused a drop in crime." MediaWatch concluded that "in 244 gun policy stories, those favoring gun control outnumbered stories opposing gun control by 157 to 10, or a ratio of almost 16 to 1 (77 were neutral). Talking heads were slightly more balanced: gun-control advocates outnumbered gun-rights spokesmen 165 to 110 (40 were neutral)." The news coverage of my study apparently accounted for 4 of the 10 "anti-gun control" news reports. (Networks Use First Amendment Rights to Promote Opponents of Second Amendment Rights: Gun Rights Forces Outgunned on TV, MediaWatch, July 1997.)