More Guns Less Crime (49 page)

25. One problem from excluding the arrest rate was never clearly made in the first edition of this book. The reason using the arrest rate forces some county observations to be dropped is that when the number of crimes is zero, the arrest rate is "undefined." Including counties with zero crime rates biases the results toward not finding an effect because crime rates cannot fall below zero. Since these counties already have a zero crime

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rate, the passage of the right-to-carry law can produce no benefit. The more counties with zero crime rates that are included, the more the estimated benefit from the law will move toward zero.

My work with Steve Bronars also examined whether replacing the crime-specific arrest rates with the overall violent-crime or property-crime arrest rates altered the results, and we found that it had no impact on the results. There are few counties which have no violent crimes of any type, so there are few missing observations for the violent-crime arrest rate (Stephen G. Bronars and John R. Lott, Jr., " Criminal Deterrence, Geographic Spillovers, and Right-to-Carry Laws," American Economic Review 88 (May 1998): 475—79).

26. While I find it difficult to believe that anyone would argue that demographic factors are not important in explaining crime rates, I did try a couple of specification tests. Paring the demographic variables down to the percentage of the population that is black, the percentage of the population that is white, the percentage of the population that is male, and the percentage of the population in the six different age classifications leaves the results essentially unchanged. Eliminating the demographic variables entirely reduces the estimated drop in violent-crime rates from right-to-carry laws by at most one percentage point.

27. The way that the county-level data were compiled was changed in 1994. Prior to that time those jurisdictions within a county which provided data for fewer than six months were estimated to have the same offense rates as the rest of the county. From 1994 onward, the imputation method was applied only to counties with less than three months of data. For jurisdictions with at least six months of data prior to 1994 and at least three months of data after that time, the jurisdiction was calculated to have 12/N offenses, where N is the number of months reported.

Because of concerns that this might affect estimates using data after 1993,1 reran the regressions reported in table 9.1 by including a variable for the change in a county's crime rate between 1993 and 1994. This change variable was included for the 1994—1996 observations to account for the relative differences that this change in measurement might have had across different counties. The results are similar to those already reported. The annual difference in the trends in violent-crime rates before and after the passage of a right-to-carry law are —1.4 percent for murder, —2.94 percent for rape, —2.8 percent for robbery, and —3.12 percent for aggravated assault. All the results are significant at better than the .01 percent level with F-tests of 17.36, 83.33, 87.38, and 87.31, respectively.

28. These data draw on research that I am currently conducting with Kevin Cremin. Kevin collected all the data used here on policing policies.

29. "[The] problem-solving effort began essentially as directed patrol operations designed to identify patterns of offending or known offenders and to deploy police to catch the offenders. All gradually evolved into quite different efforts that involved activities other than arrest and agencies other than the police. The attack on burglaries in the housing projects involved surveying tenants, cleaning the projects, creating a multiagency task force to deal with particular problems in the housing projects, and organizing the tenants not only to undertake block watches but also to make demands on city agencies. The attack on thefts from cars eventually involved the inclusion of police officers in the design of new parking lots to make them less vulnerable to theft. The attack on prostitution and robbery involved enhanced code enforcement against hotels and bars that provided the meeting places for prostitutes and their customers as well as decoy operations" (Christopher Slobogin, "Why Liberals Should Chuck the Exclusionary Rule," University of Illinois Law Review 99 (1999): 363.

30. The data on community-oriented policing, problem-oriented policing, and the broken-windows strategy were primarily obtained by using the Westlaw "News" database. For community policing, the search took the form [name of city] & "community policing" & DA(BEF 1/1/1997) & DA(AFT 1/1/1975). For problem-oriented policing, the search

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took the form ("Problem Solving Policing" or "Problem-Solving Policing" or "Problem Oriented Policing" or "Problem-Oriented Policing") & DA(AFT 1/1/1975) & DA(BEF 1/1/ 1997). Finally, for the broken-windows strategy, the search consisted of "Broken Window" & Crime & DA(AFT 1/1/1975) & DA(BEF 1/1/1997) AND NOT "Broken Windows." Other sources were also investigated. For community policing, the sources included Robert C. Trojanowicz and Hazel A. Harden, "The Status of Contemporary Community Policing Programs," National Center for Community Policing, 1985; Washington State University, Division of Governmental Studies and Services (DGSS), surveys of police administrators conducted at three-year intervals between 1978 and 1994; Anna Sampson, "National Survey of Community Policing Strategies, 1992—93"; and Robert C. Trojanowicz et al., "Community Policing: A Survey of Police Departments in the United States," 1994. However, the only one of these studies which identifies the cities is the 1985 Trojanowicz and Harden study. The authors of the other studies were unwilling to identify the cities in their samples. For the broken-windows strategy, George Kelling's book was also used to identify additional cities (George L. Kelling, Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities [New York: Free Press, 1998]).

31. John R. Lott, Jr., "Does a Helping Hand Put Others at Risk? Affirmative Action, Police Departments, and Crime," Economic Inquiry (forthcoming).

32. For example, policing policies may have changed because of concerns about future crime rates. Not adopting the change might have resulted in even more crime.

33. Bartholomew Sullivan, "Students Recall 'Unreal' Rampage," Commercial Appeal, June 11, 1998, p. Al.

34. Lance Gay, "New Gun Measure Wouldn't Have Halted School Tragedies," Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 30, 1999, p. 19A.

35. Pam Belluck and Jodi Wilgoren, "Shattered Lives—a Special Report: Caring Parents, No Answers, in Columbine Killers' Pasts," New York Times, June 29, 1999, p. Al; and Virginia Culver, "Pastor Comforts Gunman's Family," Arizona Republic, May 1, 1999, p. D7.

36. Evelyn Larrubia, Ted Rohrlich, and Andrew Blankstein, "Suspect Scouted 3 Prominent L.A. Jewish Sites as Targets," Los Angeles Times, Aug. 13, 1999, p. 1.

37. An earlier attempt by Congress to pass this law was never really enforced and was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1995. The 1995 law put in simple "boiler plate" language requiring that prosecutors make a finding that the gun or parts of the gun had been involved in interstate commerce.

38. To illustrate, let the probability that a single individual is carrying a concealed handgun equal .10. Assume further that there are 10 individuals in a public place. Then the probability that at least one of them is armed is 1 — .9 10 , or about .65.

39. Baltimore Sun, Apr. 30, 1999.

40. Greg Pierce, "Professional Viewpoint," Washington Times, Sept. 3, 1999, p. A5.

41. Even so-called smart locks, which are activated by one's fingerprint or by a special ring with a computer, pose several types of risks. With locks activated by fingerprints, a spouse would be unable to use the gun to come to the other person's rescue if the gun were coded for the other person. The person must also correctly position the finger on the fingerprint reader. Small differences in the angle of the finger may leave the gun inoperable even for the designated user.

42. This discussion is based upon research that I am currently doing with John Whitley.

43. Peter Cummings, David C. Grossman, Frederick P. Rivara, and Thomas D. Koep-sell, "State Gun Safe Storage Laws and Child Mortality Due to Firearms," Journal of the American Medical Association 278 (Oct. 1, 1997): 1084-86.

44. U.S. General Accounting Office, "Accidental Shootings: Many Deaths and Injuries Caused by Firearms Could Be Prevented" (Washington, DC: U.S. General Accounting Office, Mar. 1991).

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45. An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association does not control for any other factors but claims that 23 percent of the accidental gun deaths for children under fifteen would have been prevented by these storage rules. In 1996, this would have amounted to thirty-two lives if the laws had been in effect for the entire country. One obvious mistake that this article made was that it made no attempt to account for the normal downward trend in accidental gun deaths that would have continued to at least some extent even without these safe-storage laws. Since no other variables were being controlled for, all of the drop was being attributed to the new law (Cummings et al., "State Gun Safe Storage Laws").

46. As of this writing, the Violence Policy Center still has a section of its Web site entitled "Funder of the Lott CCW Study Has Links to the Gun Industry" at http:// www.vpc.org/fact__sht/lottlink.htm.

47. M. W. Guzy, "Soft Logic on Hard Facts on Guns," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 22, 1998, p. B7.

48. Shelley Kiel [state senator in Nebraska], "Some Gun Restrictions Needed," Omaha World-Herald, July 11, 1998, p. 11.

49. Kevin Beck, "Conceal Carry," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Aug. 12, 1998.

50. Minnesota Representative Wesley Skoglund on PBS's Almanac, Sept. 26, 1998.

51. Take for example a June 21, 1999, discussion between two people on talk, politics.guns:

"Dutch Courage": hey, did you know Lott's study was funded by a gun manufacturer? I did. That's a little suspicious, don't you think?

"Shawn Wilson": You're right, it was a foundation founded by the owner of a gun company, which is now an ammunition company, and further the foundation has large holdings in this company, and several of the directors of this foundation are men with standing within the company which shares the name. So much for his reputation as an honest scholar and academic reputation, eh?

52. Linnet Myers, " Go Ahead ... Make Her Day," Chicago Tribune, May 2, 1999, p. C12. See also Diane Carman, "Gun-Bill Premise Is Bogus," Denver Post, Mar. 23, 1999, p. Bl: "While gun-control activists have criticized Lott's work because it is funded in part through a grant from the Olin Foundation, which was founded by the largest manufacturer of ammunition in the U.S., [Jens] Ludwig argues that the debate about the grant money 'only distracts people. The study fails on its merits.'"

53. This quote is from the Web site of Handgun Control, Inc. (http://www.handgun-control.org/lott.htm). The Violence Policy Center's claim that I believe that "increases in the percent of minority police officers increase crime rates" can be found at http:// www.vpc.org/fact__sht/wholott.htm. Of course, the Violence Policy Center fails to mention the rest of the abstract in question, which points out that the paper (Lott, "Does a Helping Hand Put Others at Risk?") will investigate "whether these increases in crime are due to changes in the quality of all new police officers or just minority officers."

54. The previous footnote provides references for this claim on gun-control Web sites. Similar statements were made by Luis Tolley, the western regional director for Handgun Control, Inc., at a debate that I participated in at Claremont College, and Tom Diaz, an analyst for the Violence Policy Center, has made this claim a couple of times when we appeared on radio shows together.

55. Lott, "Does a Helping Hand Put Others at Risk?"

56. The selective quoting was obviously a well-orchestrated campaign, with newspaper editorials also getting involved in repeating the statements by Handgun Control. Consider the following editorial attack on me: "In May 1998, for instance, he published the following in a police research journal: 'Increasing black officers' share of the police force by one percentage point increases murders by four percent, the violent crimes by

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seven percent, and property crimes by eight percent.... More black and female officers are also associated with declines in both the arrest and conviction rates'" (Editorial, "A Lott More Guns," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Mar. 23, 1999, p. B6). They failed to quote some other sentences in this same piece, such as "Not all black officers nor all white officers nor all officers of any other race are of the same quality. Some black officers are undoubtedly better at reducing crime than most potential white officers, and some white officers are probably better than most potential black officers. The question is how to select those officers who will do the best job. There is the possibility that choosing applicants by race or sex could work against hiring the best officers available.... One must be very clear about what is happening, however. The large impact of more black officers indicates that more than just the quality of new minority recruits or new minority promotions are affected. Indeed, changing tests to employ a greater percentage of blacks appears to make it more difficult to screen out lower-quality candidates generally, including whites and other racial groups" (John R. Lott, Jr., "Who Is Really Hurt by Affirmative Action?" Subject to Debate, May 1998, pp. 1, 3).

57. William F. Shughart II, "More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws: Review," Southern Economic Journal 65, no. 4 (Apr. 1, 1999): 978.

58. Bruce L. Benson, "Review of More Guns, Less Crime," Public Choice 100 (Sept. 1999), nos. 3-4: 309.

59. Stan Liebowitz, "Handgun Argument Is Loaded," Dallas Morning News, June 21, 1998.

60. Nelson Lund, "Gunning Down Crime: The Statistics of Concealed Weapons," Weekly Standard, June 1, 1998.