More Guns Less Crime (48 page)

10. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, A Progress Report: Gun-Dealer Licensing and Illegal Gun Trafficking, Washington, D.C.: Department of the Treasury, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (Jan. 1997).

11. Many other restrictions on gun use have prevailed during the last couple of years, even some that appear fairly trivial. For example, in 1996 alone thirteen states voted on initiatives to restrict hunting. The initiatives were successful in eleven of the states. Congressman Steve Largent from Tulsa, Oklahoma, claims that the new rules are "part of a national effort to erode our ability to hunt. ... It wasn't a local effort. It was a national effort." Not only were the initiatives strongly supported by animal rights activists, but they also received strong support from gun-control advocates. It is probably not lost on gun-control advocates that support for gun control seems to be strongest among those who grew up in households without guns and that making hunting less attractive is one long-term way to alter support for these initiatives. See Janet Pearson, "A 'Fair Chase': Keep the Sport in Hunting," Tulsa World, Nov. 17, 1996, p. Gl.

12. For most government agencies that try to obtain higher funding, exaggerating the problems helps justify such higher funding. Michael Fitzgerald, a spokesman for the BATF in Chicago, is quoted as saying that 1 percent of federal license holders are estimated to be illegally running guns. "If that figure is accurate, the reduction of... dealers should eliminate a substantial number of traffickers." See Jim Adams, "Number of Licenses Falls Dramatically: Crime Law Puts Squeeze on Gun Dealers; Zoning Can Be Used to Keep Gun Sales Out of Private Homes," Louisville Courier-Journal, Mar. 20, 1997, p. Al.

13. During the last few years, the BATF has been much more aggressive in harassing law-abiding gun owners and retailers. A recent study using 1995 data, by Jim Couch and William Shughart, claims not only that the BATF refers dramatically more criminal firearm violations to prosecutors in states that have more National Rifle Association members, but that Clinton's own US. attorneys have declined to prosecute a much greater percentage of the cases referred to them in these states. They estimate that 54 percent of the variation across states in the BATF's criminal referrals is explained simply by the number of NRA members in a state, and that about a quarter of these higher requests for prosecutions are declined by US. attorneys. See Jim F. Couch and William F. Shughart I, "Crime, Gun Control, and the BATF: The Political Economy of Law Enforcement," University of Mississippi working paper presented at the March, 1997, Public Choice Meetings in San Francisco.

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

15. Three different types of devices are under development: X-rays, ultrasound, and radar. The first devices capable of functioning on the street are expected in 2001. See Fox Butterfield, "New Devices May Let Police Spot People on the Street Hiding Guns," New York Times, Apr. 7, 1997, p. Al.

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while allowing law-abiding citizens to keep their guns. In his view, they will provide us with the best of both worlds, allowing us to retain the benefits of private protection and to disarm criminals. See James Q. Wilson, "Just Take Away Their Guns," New York Times, Mar. 20, 1994, sec. 6, p. 47.

17. In airports or courts, for example, such searches would probably be allowed. Whether these devices will be deemed constitutional if used on the street is less clear.

18. I cannot end, however, without at least mentioning several excellent law-review articles on the issue of what was intended in the Second Amendment: see Nelson Lund, "The Second Amendment, Political Liberty, and the Right to Self-Preservation," Alabama Law Review 33 (1988): 103-47; Robert J. Cottrol and Raymond T. Diamond, "The Fifth Auxiliary Right," Yale Law Journal 104 (1995): 309-42; Don B. Kates, "Handgun Prohibition and the Original Meaning of the Second Amendment," University of Michigan Law Review 82 (1983): 204—68; William Van Alstyne, "The Second Amendment Right to Arms," Duke Law Review 43 (Apr. 1994): 1236—55; and Sanford Levinson, "The Embarrassing Second Amendment," Yale Law Journal 99 (Dec. 1989): 637-89. Legal scholars seem to be in general agreement on the way the Second Amendment's use of the word militia is so completely misinterpreted in current discussions of what the amendment means. The only twentieth-century case in which the Supreme Court directly interpreted the Second Amendment was United States v. Miller, 307 US 174 (1939). The court was quite clear that historical sources "showed plainly enough that the Militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense." The court accepted "the common view ... that adequate defense of the country and laws could be secured through the Militia—citizens primarily, soldiers on occasion."

The framers of the Constitution were also very clear on this issue. James Madison wrote in the Federalist papers that if a standing army threatened citizens' liberties, it would be opposed by "a militia amounting to near a half-million citizens with arms in their hands" ; see Clinton Rossiter, ed., The Federalist no. 46 (1961): 299. An excellent discussion of this and related issues is presented by David L. Franklin and Heather L. O'Farrell in their University of Chicago Moot Court brief on Printz and Mack v United States, Apr. 18, 1997.

CHAPTER NINE

1. Editorial, "Why Sharon Laid Down Her Arms," New York Post, Aug. 19, 1999, p. 8.

2. Ruth Teichroeb, "Hearing Today for Boy Expelled over Squirt Gun," Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Sept. 22, 1998, p. Bl. To show how extreme these cases have gotten, young students have been suspended even for taking toenail clippers to school (Carolyn Bower, "Huffman School Suspends Student for Possessing Toenail Clippers," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sept. 28, 1999).

3. This statement was in response to the following question: "Now there does not seem to be that much that this kind of program works to reduce crime, in fact, no evidence, as far as I can tell, at all. How do you respond to that?" (Thalia Assuras, "Andrew Cuomo, Secretary of HUC, Explains President Clinton's Gun Buyback Program," CBS's This Morning, Sept. 9, 1999.

4. "Special Report: America under the Gun: What Must Be Done," Newsweek, Aug. 23, 1999.

5. Brian Rooney and Ted Koppel, "Guns—an American Way of Life and/or Death," ABC's Nightline, Aug. 10, 1999.

6. These reactions are hardly limited to the United States. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan proposes that nations "adopt gun control laws including a prohibition of unrestricted trade and private ownership of small arms" ("UN Targets Small Arms," BBC News, Sept. 25, 1999, 0723 GMT).

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and South Carolina enacted "shall-issue" laws. However, these did not go into effect until extremely late in the year. Louisiana did not even start issuing applications until the end of September (Lisa Roland, "Applications for Concealed Handgun Permits to Be Issued This Week," Gannett News Service, Sept. 20, 1999). In Kentucky, permits were also not issued until the very end of the year (Michael Quinlan, "Concealed Guns: Permits Will Take Time, Law Will Go into Effect Tomorrow," Louisville Courier-Journal, Sept. 30, 1996, p. Al). South Carolina's law went into effect August 22,1996, but its permitting process also took a couple of months to start actually issuing permits (Kathy Steele, "Women with Guns on Rise," Augusta (GA) Chronicle, Apr. 11, 1997, p. B2).

8. While I believe the much more interesting question is how crime rates change before and after the adoption of right-to-carry laws, the states with right-to-carry laws in effect for at least one year in 1996 had an average violent crime rate of 446.6 per 100,000 people, while the states with more restrictive "may-issue" rules had a violent crime rate of 592.6, and states banning concealed handguns a rate of 789.7. The main reason for not focusing on these numbers is simply that it ignores whether these states tended to be the lowest-crime-rate states even before they adopted right-to-carry laws. One method that partially accounts for this concern is to examine the cross-sectional data using the demographic, poverty, income, and other variables that have been employed throughout the book. After controlling for these other factors, the presence of a right-to-carry law implies a violent crime rate 15 percent lower than the absence of a law implies, and the effect is quite statistically significant, with a t-statistic that is significant at better than the .01 percent level for a two-tailed t-test.

9. David Hemenway, "Book Review of More Guns, Less Crime? New England Journal of Medicine, Dec. 31, 1998, pp. 2029-30.

10. Jens Ludwig, "Concealed-Gun-Carrying Law and Violent Crime: Evidence from State Panel Data," International Review of Law and Economics 18 (Sept. 1998): 239-54.

11. The Northeast includes Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont; the South includes Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia; the Midwest includes Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, West Virginia, and Wisconsin; the Rocky Mountains include Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming; and the Pacific states include Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington.

12. Because of the criticism that it is unrealistic to use a simple dummy variable, I have decided to focus from the beginning on the more realistic approach that examines the before- and after-law trends in crime rates.

13. The results using the old specifications also continue to be very similar.

14. As another test of the sensitivity of the results, I also reestimated the before-and-after trends by limiting them to ten years before and after the adoption of the right-to-carry laws. The results equivalent to table 9.1 are —3.1 percent for violent crime, —0.8 percent for murder, —2.0 percent for rape, —2.6 percent for robbery, —3.3 percent for aggravated assault, and —0.4 percent for property crime. All the violent-crime category results are significant at least at the .01 percent level except for murder, which is significant at the 4 percent level.

15. See also figures 7.7—7.9.

16. Glenn Puit, "Survey: Gun Sales Increasing since Grocery Store Shooting," Las Vegas Review-Journal, June 24, 1999, p. 4A; and "Gun Sales up 30 Percent This Year," Associated Press Newswire, dateline San Francisco, Aug. 28, 1999. The Las Vegas Review-Journal article mentions that "Firearms instructors also said they have seen a jump in the number of people wanting to know the requirements to carry a concealed weapon. And, Las Vegas police have

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seen an increase in requests for concealed weapons permits in recent weeks." The Associated Press story mentions that "Others say recent crime stories in the news, from the shooting rampage at a Los Angeles Jewish day camp to the tourist killings in Yosemite National Park, have motivated gun buyers."

17. The average murder rate for states over this period is 7.57 per 100,000; for rapes, 33.8; for aggravated assaults, 282.4; and for robberies, 161.8. A 4 percent change in murders is 0.3 per 100,000, a 7 percent change in rape is 2.4 per 100,000, a 5 percent change in aggravated assaults is 14.1 per 100,000, and a 13 percent change in robberies is 21 per 100,000. By contrast, a one-percentage-point increase in the population with permits is 1,000 per 100,000.

18. While small, lightweight guns are available and new materials have also made it possible to make lighter guns, most handguns weigh about the same as a laptop computer. Carrying them around requires some significant inconvenience.

19. More precisely, I replaced the predicted percentage of the population with permits with the predicted percentage of the population with permits divided by the permit fee. This is the same as the interactions done earlier looking at the percentage with permits multiplied by county demographics.

20. Ideally, one would also want to use the expected variation in permit rates across counties (though those data were not available at the time that I put these results together), but since I am examining all counties in the state, the state permitting rates at least allow us to rank the relative impact of right-to-carry laws across states.

21. The different drafts of their paper also went through different specifications.

22. Edward E. Learner, "Let's Take the Con Out of Econometrics," American Economic Review 173 (Mar. 1983): 31-43; and Walter S. McManus, "Estimates of the Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment: The Importance of the Researcher's Prior Beliefs," Journal of Political Economy 93 (Feb. 1985): 417-25.

23. I also included a tenth variable that examined the percentage of the adult population that was in prison, but there were sufficient theoretical objections to including this that I have decided not to report these results in the text. The major theoretical problem is that this variable is a "stock" while the crime rate is a "flow." In other words, the prison population is created by the number of people who are convicted and sentenced over many years and not just how harsh the current sentences are. In fact, if tough sentencing in the past makes it more likely that current criminals will not be sentenced to prison terms as long as those of past criminals (e.g., because of a takeover of the prison system by the courts), it is possible that there might even be a negative relationship between the prison population and the current toughness of the system. The bottom line is that past punishment is only roughly related to current punishment, particularly when average state differences are already being taken into account through fixed effects and when regional yearly fixed effects have also been added.

24. In a powerful piece, Isaac Ehrlich and Zhiqiang Liu show that classic economics papers concerning the law of demand, production theory, and investment theory would fail this test (Isaac Ehrlich and Zhiqiang Liu, "Sensitivity Analyses of the Deterrence Hypothesis: Let's Keep the Econ in Econometrics," Journal of Law and Economics 42 [Apr. 1999]: 455—88). Because of this strong bias toward not finding "true" relationships, Learner and McManus have dropped off the 10 percent most extreme values on both ends of their estimates when they have reported their results. Yet even this does not protect most studies from having their results determined to be "fragile" by this test.