More Guns Less Crime (47 page)

6. One of the unfortunate consequences of such attacks is the anger that they generate among the audience. For example, after Congressman Schumer's letter to the Wall Street Journal, I received dozens of angry telephone calls denouncing me for publishing my Wall Street Journal op-ed piece on concealed-handgun laws without first publicly stating that the research had been paid for by gun manufacturers. Other letters from the Violence Policy Center making these funding claims produced similar results.

Understandably, given the seriousness of the charges, this matter has been brought up by legislators in every state in which I have testified before the state legislature. Other politicians have also taken up these charges. Minnesota State Rep. Wes Skoglund (DFL— Minneapolis) provided one of the milder statements of these charges in the Minneapolis Star Tribune (Mar. 29, 1997, p. A13): "Betterman [a Minnesota state representative] uses a much-publicized study by John Lott Jr., of the University of Chicago, to back up her claims about the benefits of her radical gun-carry law.... But what no one has told you about Lott's study is that it has been found to be inaccurate and flawed. And Betterman didn't tell you that the study was funded by the Olin Foundation, which was created by the founder of Winchester Arms."

7. I telephoned Ms. Rand to ask her what evidence she had for her claim that the study was "the product of gun-industry funding" and reminded her that the public relations office at the University of Chicago had already explained the funding issue to her boss, Josh Sugarmann, but Ms. Rand hung up on me within about a minute.

8. Alex Rodriquez, "Gun Debate Flares; Study: Concealed Weapons Deter Crime" Chicago Sun-Times, Aug. 9, 1996, p. 2. Kotowski made his remark at a press conference organized by the Violence Policy Center, whose president, Josh Sugarmann, had been clearly told by the press office at the University of Chicago on August 6 that these charges were not true (as the letter by William E. Simon shown later will explain). Catherine Behan in the press office spent an hour trying to explain to him how funding works at Universities.

NOTES TO PAGES 124-129/289

9. Chicago Tribune, Aug. 15, 1996.

10. "Study: Concealed Guns Deterring Violent Crime," Austin American Statesman, Aug. 9, 1996, p. A12.

11. The brief correction ran in the Austin American Statesman, Aug. 10, 1996.

12. As Mr. Simon mentions, one journalist who looked into these charges was Stephen Chapman of the Chicago Tribune. One part of his article that is particularly relevant follows:

Another problem is that the [Olin] foundation didn't (1) choose Lott as a fellow, (2) give him money, or (3) approve his topic. It made a grant to the law school's law and economics program (one of many grants it makes to top universities around the country). A committee at the law school then awarded the fellowship to Lott, one of many applicants in a highly competitive process.

Even the committee had nothing to do with his choice of topics. The fellowship was to allow Lott—a prolific scholar who has published some 75 academic articles—to do research on whatever subject he chose. ...

To accept their conspiracy theory, you have to believe the following: A company that derives a small share of its earnings from sporting ammunition somehow prevailed on an independent family foundation to funnel money to a scholar who was willing to risk his academic reputation (and, since he does not yet have tenure, his future employment) by fudging data to serve the interests of the firearms lobby—and one of the premier research universities in the world cooperated in the fraud. (See Stephen Chapman, "A Gun Study and a Conspiracy Theory," Chicago Tribune, Aug. 15, 1996, p. 31.)

13. A Gannett Newswire story quoted a spokeswoman for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence who made similar statements: "But Katcher said the study ... was funded by the Olin Foundation, which has strong ties to the gun industry. The study has 'been proven by a series of well-known, well-respected researchers to be inaccurate, false, junk science,' she said." (Dennis Camire, "Legislation before Congress Would Allow Concealed Weapons Nationwide," Gannett News Service, June 6, 1997.)

14. John R. Lott, Jr., "Should the Wealthy Be Able to 'Buy Justice'?" Journal of Political Economy 95 (Dec. 1987): 1307.

15. "Notebook," The New Republic, Apr. 14, 1997, p. 10.

16. After much effort, Randy was eventually able to get Cynthia Henry Thielen, a Hawaiian State Representative, to participate in the radio program.

17. Richard Morin, "Unconventional Wisdom: New Facts and Hot Stats from the Social Sciences," Washington Post, Mar. 23, 1997, p. C5.

18. It is surely not uncommon for academics to write letters to their local newspapers or to national or international publications, and indeed such letters were also written (see, for example, The Economist, Dec. 7,1996, p. 8). But to track down the letters of everyday citizens to local newspapers and send replies is unusual.

19. The Springfield State Journal-Register, Nov. 26,1996. Steven Teret, director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research wrote dozens of letters to newspapers across the country. They usually began with statements like the following: "Recently in a letter to the editor dated October 19, Kurt Amebury cited the work of two University of Chicago professors" (Orlando Sentinel, Nov. 16, 1996, p. A18); "Recently the Dispatch published a letter to the editor citing the work of two researchers" (Columbus Dispatch, Nov. 16, 1996, p. All); "The State Journal-Register Oct. 28 published two letters citing research by the University of Chicago's John Lott" (Springfield State Journal-Register, Nov. 13, 1996, p. 6); or "A recent letter to the editor ..." (Buffalo News, Nov. 17, 1996, p. H3). In late November, I asked Stephen Teret how many newspapers he had sent letters to. He would not give me an exact count, but he said "dozens" and then listed the names of some major newspapers to which they had

290 / NOTES TO PAGES 131-149

written. It is curious that none of the effort put into responding to my paper by the Center has gone into writing a comment for submission to the Journal ofLegal Studies, where my original paper was published. Nor has the Center prepared a response for any other scholarly journal.

20. My opinion piece appeared in the Omaha World-Herald, Mar. 9, 1997, p. B9.

21. Virginia Code Annotated, § 18.2-3088 (1988).

22. This discussion relies on conversations with Clayton Cramer.

23. This point is similar to the "broken-window" argument made by Wilson and {Celling; see James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, "Making Neighborhoods Safe ," Atlantic Monthly, Feb. 1989.

24. Some robberies also involve rape. While I am not taking a stand on whether rape or robbery is the primary motivation for the attack, there might be cases where robbery was the primary motive.

25. Information obtained from Kathy O'Connell at the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority.

26. For example, see Douglas Weil, "A Few Thoughts on the Study of Handgun Violence and Gun Control," Washington Times, Aug. 22, 1996, p. A16.

27. The durability of these initial false claims about Florida's crime rates can be seen in more recent popular publications. For example, William Tucker, writing in the Weekly Standard, claims that "Florida crime rates remained level from 1988 to 1990, then took a big dive. As with all social phenomena, though, it is difficult to isolate cause and effect." See William Tucker, "Maybe You Should Carry a Handgun," Weekly Standard, Dec. 16,1996, p. 30.

28. In an attempt to facilitate Black's and Nagin's research, I provided them not only with all the data that they used but also computer files containing the regressions, in order to facilitate the replication of each of my regressions. It was thus very easy for them to try all possible permutations of my regressions, doing such things as excluding one state at a time or excluding data based on other criteria.

29. Dan Black and Dan Nagin, "Do 'Right-to-Carry' Laws Deter Violent Crime?" Carnegie-Mellon University working paper, Dec. 18, 1996, p. 5.

30. In addition, because the regressions use individual county dummy variables, so that they are really measuring changes in crime rates relative to each county's mean, one need not be concerned with the possibility that the average crime rates for the years that are farthest beyond the adoption of the concealed-handgun laws are being pulled down by relatively low crime rates in some states.

31. Ian Ayres and Steven Levitt, "Measuring Positive Externalities from Unobservable Victim Precaution: An Empirical Analysis of Lojack " NBER working paper 5928 (1997). The main issue with their empirical estimates, however, is whether they might be overestimating the impact from Lojack because they do not control for any other responses to higher auto-theft rates. For example, while higher auto theft rates might trigger implementation of Lojack, they might also increase purchases of other antitheft devices like The Club. In addition, the political support for altering the distribution of police resources among different types of crimes might also change. Unfortunately, neither Ayres and Levitt nor Lojack has made the information on the number of Lojacks installed available to other researchers. My attempts to replicate their results with dummy variables have found insignificant effects.

32. Ultimately, however, the levels of significance that I have tested for are the final arbiters in deciding whether one has enough data, and the results presented here are quite statistically significant.

33. Daniel W Webster, "The Claims That Right-to-Carry Laws Reduce Violent Crime Are Unsubstantiated," The Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, copy obtained March 6, 1997, p. 5.

34. Jens Ludwig, "Do Permissive Concealed-Carry Laws Reduce Violent Crime?" Georgetown University working paper (Oct. 8, 1996), p. 12.

NOTES TO PAGES 150-161/291

35. "Battered Woman Found Not Guilty for Shooting Her Husband Five Times," San Francisco Examiner, Apr. 9, 1997.

36. In Chicago from 1990 to 1995, 383 murders (or 7.2 percent of all murders) were committed by a spouse.

37. For a detailed discussion of how Black's and Nagin's arguments have changed over time, see my paper entitled "If at First You Don't Succeed ..." : The Perils of Data Mining When There Is a Paper (and Video) Trail: The Concealed-Handgun Debate," Journal of Legal Studies 27 (January 1998), forthcoming.

38. Black and Nagin, "Do 'Right-to-Carry' Laws Deter Violent Crime?" Carnegie-Mellon working paper, version of December 18, p. 5, n. 4.

39. The December 18, 1996, version of their paper included a footnote admitting this point:

Lott and Mustard weight their regression by the county's population, and smaller counties are much more likely to have missing data than larger counties. When we weight the data by population, the frequencies of missing data are 11.7% for homicides, 5.6% for rapes, 2.8% for assaults, and 5% for robberies.

In discussing the sample comprising only counties with more than 100,000 people, they write in the same paper that "the (weighted) frequencies of missing arrest ratios are 1.9% for homicides, 0.9% for rapes, 1.5% for assaults, and 0.9% for robberies."

40. For rape, 82 percent of the counties are deleted to reduce the weighted frequencies of missing data from 5.6 to 0.9 percent. Finally, for robbery (the only other category that they examine), 82 percent of the observations are removed to reduce the weighted missing data from 5 to 0.9 percent.

41. The reluctance of gun-control advocates to share their data is quite widespread. In May 1997 I tried to obtain data from the Police Foundation about a study that they had recently released by Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig, but after many telephone calls I was told by Earl Hamilton on May 27, "Well, lots of other researchers like Arthur Kel-lermann do not release their data." I responded by saying that was true, but that it was not something other researchers approved of, nor did it give people much confidence in his results.

42. See William Alan Bartley, Mark Cohen, and Luke Froeb, "The Effect of Concealed-Weapon Laws: Estimating Misspecification Uncertainty," Vanderbilt University working paper (1997).

CHAPTER EIGHT

1. Allison Thompson, "Robber Gets Outgunned on Westside," Jadb

2. Craig Jarvis, "Pizza Worker's Husband Shoots Masked Bandit," Raleigh News and Observer, Dec. 11, 1996, p. B3.

3. Other work that I have done indicates that while hiring certain types of police officers can be quite effective in reducing crime rates, the net benefit from hiring an additional police officer is about a quarter of the benefit from spending an equivalent amount on concealed handguns. See John R. Lott, Jr., "Does a Helping Hand Put Others At Risk? Affirmative Action, Police Departments, and Crime," University of Chicago working paper (July 1997).

4. The cost of public prisons runs about twice this rate; see Mike Flaherty, "Prisons for Profit; Can Texas System Work for Wisconsin's Overflowing System," Wisconsin State Journal, Feb. 16, 1997, p. Al.

5. Fox Butterfield, "Serious Crime Decreased for Fifth Year in a Row," New York Times, Jan. 5, 1997, p. 10.

292 / NOTES TO PAGES 161-163

6. Michael Fumento, "Are We Winning the Fight Against Crime?" Investor's Business Daily, Feb. 5, 1997, p. A34.

7. Yet there never was much controversy over this issue: when Congress debated the law, no one, not even the National Rifle Association, opposed background checks. The dispute was over a five-day waiting period versus an "instant check."

8. Fumento, "Fight Against Crime," p. A34.

9. After the Supreme Court decision, Arkansas completely stopped the background checks, while Ohio has essentially gutted the rules by making background checks voluntary. In addition, as "Ohio Deputy Attorney General Mark Weaver said, the responsibility for conducting background checks rests with counties and cities in most states—rather than with statewide agencies—and ... 'hundreds of counties' stopped doing checks after the Supreme Court ruling." (Joe Stumpe, "Arkansas Won't Touch Gun Checks 'Unwarranted,' Chief Cop Says," Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, July 29, 1997, p. 1A.