More Guns Less Crime (5 page)

While some evidence indicates that increased penalties for using a gun in the commission of a crime reduce crime, the effect is small. Furthermore, I find no crime-reduction benefits from state-mandated waiting periods and background checks before people are allowed to purchase guns. At the federal level, the Brady law has proven to be no more effective. Surprisingly, there is also little benefit from training requirements or age restrictions for concealed-handgun permits.

Two How to Test the Effects of

Gun Control

The Existing Literature

Despite intense feelings on both sides of the gun debate, I believe everyone is at heart motivated by the same concerns: Will gun control increase or decrease the number of lives lost? Will these laws improve or degrade the quality of life when it comes to violent crime? The common fears we all share with regard to murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults motivate this discussion. Even those who debate the meaning of the Constitution's Second Amendment cannot help but be influenced by the answers to these questions. 1

While anecdotal evidence is undoubtedly useful in understanding the issues at hand, it has definite limits in developing public policy. Good arguments exist on both sides, and neither side has a monopoly on stories of tragedies that might have been avoided if the law had only been different. While one side presents the details of a loved one senselessly murdered in a massacre like the December 1993 Colin Ferguson shooting on the Long Island Railroad, the other side points to claims that if only Texas had allowed concealed handguns, the twenty-two lives lost in Luby's restaurant in Killeen in October 1991 could have been saved. Less publicized but equally tragic stories have been just as moving.

Surveys have filled many important gaps in our knowledge; nevertheless, they suffer from many inherent problems. For example, how accurately can a person judge whether the presence of a gun actually saved her life or whether it really prevented a criminal from attacking? Might people's policy preferences influence how they answer the pollster's questions? Other serious concerns arise with survey data. Does a criminal who is thwarted from committing one particular crime merely substitute another victim or another type of crime? Or might this general deterrence raise the costs of these undesirable activities enough so that some criminals stop committing crimes? Survey data just has not been able to answer such questions.

To study these issues more effectively, academics have turned to statistics on crime. Depending on what one counts as academic research, there

are at least two hundred studies on gun control. The existing work falls into two categories, using either "time-series" or "cross-sectional" data. Time-series data deal with one particular area (a city, county, or state) over many years; cross-sectional data look across many different geographic areas within the same year. The vast majority of gun-control studies that examine time-series data present a comparison of the average murder rates before and after the change in laws; those that examine cross-sectional data compare murder rates across places with and without certain laws. Unfortunately, these studies make no attempt to relate fluctuations in crime rates to changing law-enforcement factors like arrest or conviction rates, prison-sentence lengths, or other obvious variables.

Both time-series and cross-sectional analyses have their limitations. Let us first examine the cross-sectional studies. Suppose, as happens to be true, that areas with the highest crime rates are the ones that most frequently adopt the most stringent gun-control laws. Even if restrictions on guns were to lower the crime rates, it might appear otherwise. Suppose crime rates were lowered, but not by enough to reach the level of rates in low-crime areas that did not adopt the laws. In that case, looking across areas would make it appear that stricter gun control produced higher crime. Would this be proof that stricter gun control caused higher crime? Hardly. Ideally, one should examine how the high-crime areas that adopted the controls changed over time—not only relative to their past levels but also relative to areas without the controls. Economists refer to this as an "endogeneity" problem. The adoption of the policy is a reaction (that is, "endogenous") to other events, in this case crime. 2 To correctly estimate the impact of a law on crime, one must be able to distinguish and isolate the influence of crime on the adoption of the law.

For time-series data, other problems arise. For example, while the ideal study accounts for other factors that may help explain changing crime rates, a pure time-series study complicates such a task. Many potential causes of crime might fluctuate in any one jurisdiction over time, and it is very difficult to know which one of those changes might be responsible for the shifting crime rate. If two or more events occur at the same time in a particular jurisdiction, examining only that jurisdiction will not help us distinguish which event was responsible for the change in crime. Evidence is usually much stronger if a law changes in many different places at different times, and one can see whether similar crime patterns exist before and after such changes.

The solution to these problems is to combine both time-series and cross-sectional evidence and then allow separate variables, so that each year the national or regional changes in crime rates can be separated out

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and distinguished from any local deviations. 3 For example, crime may have fallen nationally between 1991 and 1992, but what this study is able to examine is whether there is an additional decline over and above that national drop in states that have adopted concealed-handgun laws. I also use a set of measures that control for the average differences in crime rates across places even after demographic, income, and other factors have been accounted for. No previous gun-control studies have taken this approach.

The largest cross-sectional gun-control study examined 170 cities in 1980. 4 While this study controlled for many differences across cities, no variables were used to deal with issues of deterrence (such as arrest or conviction rates or prison-sentence lengths). It also suffered from the bias discussed above that these cross-sectional studies face in showing a positive relationship between gun control and crime.

The time-series work on gun control that has been most heavily cited by the media was done by three criminologists at the University of Maryland who looked at five different counties (one at a time) from three different states (three counties from Florida, one county from Mississippi, and one from Oregon) from 1973 to 1992 (though a different time period was used for Miami). 5 While this study has received a great deal of media attention, it suffers from serious problems. Even though these concealed-handgun laws were state laws, the authors say that they were primarily interested in studying the effect in urban areas. Yet they do not explain how they chose the particular counties used in their study. For example, why examine Tampa but not Fort Lauderdale, or Jacksonville but not Orlando? Like most previous studies, their research does not account for any other variables that might also help explain the crime rates.

Some cross-sectional studies have taken a different approach and used the types of statistical techniques found in medical case studies. Possibly the best known paper was done by Arthur Kellermann and his many coauthors, 6 who purport to show that "keeping a gun in the home was strongly and independently associated with an increased risk of homicide." 7 The data for this test consists of a "case sample" (444 homicides that occurred in the victim's homes in three counties) and a "control" group (388 "matched" individuals who lived near the deceased and were the same sex and race as well as the same age range). After information was obtained from relatives of the homicide victim or the control subjects regarding such things as whether they owned a gun or had a drug or alcohol problem, these authors attempted to see if the probability of a homicide was correlated with the ownership of a gun.

There are many problems with Kellermann et al.'s paper that undercut the misleading impression that victims were killed by the gun in the

home. For example, they fail to report that in only 8 of these 444 homicide cases could it be established that the "gun involved had been kept in the home." 8 More important, the question posed by the authors cannot be tested properly using their chosen methodology because of the endogeneity problem discussed earlier with respect to cross-sectional data.

To demonstrate this, suppose that the same statistical method—with a matching control group—was used to do an analogous study on the efficacy of hospital care. Assume that we collected data just as these authors did; that is, we got a list of all the people who died in a particular county over the period of a year, and we asked their relatives whether they had been admitted to a hospital during the previous year. We would also put together a control sample with people of similar ages, sex, race, and neighborhoods, and ask these men and women whether they had been in a hospital during the past year. My bet is that we would find a very strong positive relationship between those who spent time in hospitals and those who died, quite probably a stronger relationship than in Kellermann's study on homicides and gun ownership. If so, would we take that as evidence that hospitals kill people? I would hope not. We would understand that, although our methods controlled for age, sex, race, and neighborhood, the people who had visited a hospital during the past year and the people in the "control" sample who did not visit a hospital were really not the same types of people. The difference is pretty obvious: those hospitalized were undoubtedly sick, and thus it should come as no surprise that they would face a higher probability of dying.

The relationship between homicides and gun ownership is no different. The finding that those who are more likely to own guns suffer a higher homicide rate makes us ask, Why were they more likely to own guns? Could it be that they were at greater risk of being attacked? Is it possible that this difference arose because of a higher rate of illegal activities among those in the case study group than among those in the control group? Owning a gun could lower the probability of attack but still leave it higher than the probability faced by those who never felt the need to buy a gun to begin with. The fact that all or virtually all the homicide victims were killed by weapons brought into their homes by intruders makes this all the more plausible.

Unfortunately, the case study method was not designed for studying these types of social issues. Compare these endogeneity concerns with a laboratory experiment to test the effectiveness of a new drug. Some patients with the disease are provided with the drug, while others are given a placebo. The random assignment of who gets the drug and who receives the placebo is extremely important. A comparable approach to the

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link between homicide and guns would have researchers randomly place guns inside certain households and also randomly determine in which households guns would be forbidden. Who receives a gun would not be determined by other factors that might themselves be related to whether a person faces a high probability of being killed.

So how does one solve this causation problem? Think for a moment about the preceding hospital example. One approach would be to examine a change in something like the cost of going to hospitals. For example, if the cost of going to hospitals fell, one could see whether some people who would otherwise not have gone to the hospital would now seek help there. As we observed an increase in the number of people going to hospitals, we could then check to see whether this was associated with an increase or decrease in the number of deaths. By examining changes in hospital care prices, we could see what happens to people who now choose to go to the hospital and who were otherwise similar in terms of characteristics that would determine their probability of living.

Obviously, despite these concerns over previous work, only statistical evidence can reveal the net effect of gun laws on crimes and accidental deaths. The laws being studied here range from those that allow concealed-handgun permits to those demanding waiting periods or setting mandatory minimum sentences for using a gun in the commission of a crime. Instead of just examining how crime changes in a particular city or state, I analyze the first systematic national evidence for all 3,054 counties in the United States over the sixteen years from 1977 to 1992 and ask whether these rules saved or cost lives. I attempt to control for a change in the price people face in defending themselves by looking at the change in the laws regarding the carrying of concealed handguns. I will also use the data to examine why certain states have adopted concealed-handgun laws while others have not.

This book is the first to study the questions of deterrence using these data. While many recent studies employ proxies for deterrence—such as police expenditures or general levels of imprisonment—I am able to use arrest rates by type of crime and also, for a subset of the data, conviction rates and sentence lengths by type of crime. 9 1 also attempt to analyze a question noted but not empirically addressed in this literature: the concern over causality related to increases in both handgun use and crime rates. Do higher crime rates lead to increased handgun ownership or the reverse? The issue is more complicated than simply whether carrying concealed firearms reduces murders, because questions arise about whether criminals might substitute one type of crime for another as well as the extent to which accidental handgun deaths might increase.

The Impact of Concealed Handguns on Crime

Many economic studies have found evidence broadly consistent with the deterrent effect of punishment. 10 The notion is that the expected penalty affects the prospective criminars desire to commit a crime. Expectations about the penalty include the probabilities of arrest and conviction, and the length of the prison sentence. It is reasonable to disentangle the probability of arrest from the probability of conviction, since accused individuals appear to suffer large reputational penalties simply from being arrested. 11 Likewise, conviction also imposes many different penalties (for example, lost licenses, lost voting rights, further reductions in earnings, and so on) even if the criminal is never sentenced to prison. 12