More Guns Less Crime

by John R. Lott Jr

  Contents

  Preface to the Second Edition vii Preface to the First Edition ix

  One Introduction 1

  Two How to Test the Effects of Gun Control 21

  Three Gun Ownership, Gun Laws, and the Data on Crime 36

  Four Concealed-Handgun Laws and Crime Rates: The Empirical Evidence 50

  Five The Victims and the Benefits from Protection 97

  Six What Determines Arrest Rates and the Passage of

  Concealed-Handgun Laws? 117

  Seven The Political and Academic Debate 122

  Eight Some Final Thoughts 159

  Nine Epilogue 167

  Appendixes 245 Notes 263 Bibliography 311 Index 317

  Preface t o the Second Edition

  The debate set off by this book was quite astonishing to me. Despite attacks early on when my paper was published in the Journal of Legal Studies, I was still rather unprepared for the publicity generated by the book in 1998. This expanded edition not only discusses the ensuing political debate and responds to the various criticisms, but also extends the data set to cover additional years. Replicating the results over additional years is important, so as to verify the original research. The new extended and broadened data set has also allowed me to study new gun laws, ranging from safe-storage provisions to one-gun-a-month purchase rules. It has also allowed me to extend my study of the Brady law and its impact to its first three years. Other extensions of the data set include entirely new city-level statistics, which made it possible to account more fully for policing policies.

  Since I finished writing the first edition of this book in 1997, I have continued working on many related gun and crime issues. A new section of the book draws on continued research that I am conducting with numerous talented coauthors: William Landes on multiple-victim public shootings, John Whitley on safe-storage gun laws, and Kevin Cremin on police policies. Other work was published in the May 1998 American Economic Review under the title "Criminal Deterrence, Geographic Spillovers, and the Right to Carry Concealed Handguns," coauthored with Stephen Bronars. Also, an article of mine, "The Concealed Handgun Debate," was published in the January 1998 issue of the Journal of Legal Studies.

  I am grateful for the many opportunities to present my new research in a variety of academic forums and for the many useful comments that I have received. The research on guns and crime has been presented at (a partial listing) Arizona State University, Auburn University, the University of Chicago, Claremont Graduate School, the University of Houston, the University of Illinois, the University of Kansas, the University of Miami, New York University, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Southern California, Rice University, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Texas at Dallas, the University of Virginia, the College of William and Mary, and Yeshiva University School of Law, as well as at

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  the "Economics of Law Enforcement" Conference at Harvard Law School, the Association of American Law Schools meetings, the American Economic Association meetings, the American Society of Criminology meetings, the Midwestern Economic Association meetings, the National Lawyers Conference, the Southern Economic Association meetings, and the Western Economic Association meetings. Other presentations have been made at such places as the Chicago Crime Commission, the Kansas Koch Crime Commission, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation.

  Finally, I must thank the Yale Law School, where I am a senior research scholar, for providing me with the opportunity to write the new material that has been added to the book. I must also especially thank George Priest, who made this opportunity possible. The input of my wife and sons has been extremely important, and its importance has only been exceeded by their tolerance in putting up with the long working hours required to finish this revision.

  Preface t o the First Edition

  Does allowing people to own or carry guns deter violent crime? Or does it simply cause more citizens to harm each other? Using the most comprehensive data set on crime yet assembled, this book examines the relationship between gun laws, arrest and conviction rates, the socioeconomic and demographic compositions of counties and states, and different rates of violent crime and property crime. The efficacy of the Brady Law, concealed-handgun laws, waiting periods, and background checks is evaluated for the first time using nationwide, county-level data.

  The book begins with a description of the arguments for and against gun control and of how the claims should be tested. A large portion of the existing research is critically reviewed. Several chapters then empirically examine what facts influence the crime rate and answer the questions posed above. Finally, I respond to the political and academic attacks leveled against the original version of my work, which was published in the January 1997 issue of the Journal of Legal Studies.

  I would like to thank my wife, Gertrud Fremling, for patiently reading and commenting on many early drafts of this book, and my four children for sitting through more dinnertime conversations on the topics covered here than anyone should be forced to endure. David Mustard also assisted me in collecting the data for the original article, which serves as the basis for some of the discussions in chapters 4 and 5. Ongoing research with Steve Bronars and William Landes has contributed to this book. Maxim Lott provided valuable research assistance with the polling data.

  For their comments on different portions of the work included in this book, I would like to thank Gary Becker, Steve Bronars, Clayton Cramer, Ed Glaeser, Hide Ichimura, Jon Karpoff, C. B. Kates, Gary Kleck, David Kopel, William Landes, Wally Mullin, Derek Neal, Dan Polsby, Robert Reed, Tom Smith, seminar participants at the University of Chicago (the Economics and Legal Organization, the Rational Choice, and Divinity School workshops), Harvard University, Yale University, Stanford University, Northwestern University, Emory University, Fordham University, Valparaiso University, the American Law and Economics Association

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  Meetings, the American Society of Criminology, the Western Economic Association Meetings, and the Cato Institute. I also benefited from presentations at the annual conventions of the Illinois Police Association and the National Association of Treasury Agents. Further, I would like to express my appreciation to the John M. Olin Law and Economics Program at the University of Chicago Law School for its generous funding (a topic dealt with at length in chapter 7).

  American culture is a gun culture—not merely in the sense that 75 to 86 million people own a total of about 200 to 240 million guns, 1 but in the broader sense that guns pervade our debates on crime and are constantly present in movies and the news. How many times have we read about shootings, or how many times have we heard about tragic accidental gun deaths—bad guys shooting innocent victims, bad guys shooting each other in drug wars, shots fired in self-defense, police shootings of criminals, let alone shooting in wars? We are inundated by images through the television and the press. Our kids are fascinated by computer war games and toy guns.

  So we're obsessed with guns. But the big question is: What do we really know? How many times have most of us actually used a gun or seen a gun being used? How many of us have ever seen somebody in real life threatening somebody else with a gun, witnessed a shooting, or seen people defend themselves by displaying or firing guns?

  The truth is that most of us have very little firsthand experience with using guns as weapons. Even the vast majority of police officers have never exchanged shots with a suspect. 2 Most of us receive our images of guns and their use through television, film, and newspapers.

  Unfortunately, the images from the screen and the newspapers are often unrepresentative or biased because of the sensationalism and exaggeration typically
employed to sell news and entertainment. A couple of instances of news reporting are especially instructive in illustrating this bias. In a highly publicized incident, a Dallas man recently became the first Texas resident charged with using a permitted concealed weapon in a fatal shooting. 3 Only long after the initial wave of publicity did the press report that the person had been savagely beaten and in fear for his life before firing the gun. In another case a Japanese student was shot on his way to a Halloween party in Louisiana in 1992. It made international headlines and showed how defensive gun use can go tragically wrong. 4 However, this incident was a rare event: in the entire United States during a year, only about 30 people are accidentally killed by private citizens who mistakenly believe the victim to be an intruder. 5 By comparison, police

  accidentally kill as many as 330 innocent individuals annually. 6 In neither the Louisiana case nor the Texas case did the courts find the shooting to be criminal.

  While news stories sometimes chronicle the defensive uses of guns, such discussions are rare compared to those depicting violent crime committed with guns. Since in many defensive cases a handgun is simply brandished, and no one is harmed, many defensive uses are never even reported to the police. I believe that this underreporting of defensive gun use is large, and this belief has been confirmed by the many stories I received from people across the country after the publicity broke on my original study. On the roughly one hundred radio talk shows on which I discussed that study, many people called in to say that they believed having a gun to defend themselves with had saved their lives. For instance, on a Philadelphia radio station, a New Jersey woman told how two men simultaneously had tried to open both front doors of the car she was in. When she brandished her gun and yelled, the men backed away and fled. Given the stringent gun-control laws in New Jersey, the woman said she never thought seriously of reporting the attempted attack to the police.

  Similarly, while I was on a trip to testify before the Nebraska Senate, John Haxby—a television newsman for the CBS affiliate in Omaha— privately revealed to me a frightening experience that he had faced in the summer of 1995 while visiting in Arizona. At about 10 a.m., while riding in a car with his brother at the wheel, they stopped for a red light. A man appeared wielding a "butcher's knife" and opened the passenger door, but just as he was lunging towards John, the attacker suddenly turned and ran away. As John turned to his brother, he saw that his brother was holding a handgun. His brother was one of many who had recently acquired permits under the concealed-handgun law passed in Arizona the previous year.

  Philip Van Cleave, a former reserve deputy sheriff in Texas, wrote me, "Are criminals afraid of a law-abiding citizen with a gun? You bet. Most cases of a criminal being scared off by an armed citizen are probably not reported. But I have seen a criminal who was so frightened of an armed, seventy-year-old woman that in his panic to get away, he turned and ran right into a wall! (He was busy trying to kick down her door, when she opened a curtain and pointed a gun at him.)"

  Such stories are not limited to the United States. On February 3, 1996, outside a bar in Texcoco, Mexico (a city thirty miles east of Mexico City), a woman used a gun to stop a man from raping her. When the man lunged at the woman, "ripping her clothes and trying to rape her," she pulled a .22-caliber pistol from her purse and shot her attacker once in the chest, killing him. 7 The case generated much attention in Mexico

  when a judge initially refused to dismiss murder charges against the woman because she was viewed as being responsible for the attempted rape, having "enticed" the attacker "by having a drink with him at the bar." 8

  If a national survey that I conducted is correct, 98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack. Such stories are not hard to find: pizza deliverymen defend themselves against robbers, carjackings are thwarted, robberies at automatic teller machines are prevented, and numerous armed robberies on the streets and in stores are foiled, 9 though these do not receive the national coverage of other gun crimes. 10 Yet the cases covered by the news media are hardly typical; most of the encounters reported involve a shooting that ends in a fatality. 11

  A typical dramatic news story involved an Atlanta woman who prevented a carjacking and the kidnapping of her child; she was forced to shoot her assailant:

  A College Park woman shot and killed an armed man she says was trying to carjack her van with her and her 1-year-old daughter inside, police said Monday....

  Jackson told police that the gunman accosted her as she drove into the parking lot of an apartment complex on Camp Creek Parkway. She had planned to watch a broadcast of the Evander Holyfield-Mike Tyson fight with friends at the complex.

  She fired after the man pointed a revolver at her and ordered her to "move over" she told police. She offered to take her daughter and give up the van, but the man refused, police said.

  "She was pleading with the guy to let her take the baby and leave the van, but he blocked the door," said College Park Detective Reed Pollard. "She was protecting herself and the baby."

  Jackson, who told police she bought the .44-caliber handgun in September after her home was burglarized, said she fired several shots from the gun, which she kept concealed in a canvas bag beside her car seat. "She didn't try to remove it," Pollard said. "She just fired." 12

  Although the mother saved herself and her baby by her quick actions, it was a risky situation that might have ended differently. Even though there was no police officer to help protect her or her child, defending herself was not necessarily the only alternative. She could have behaved passively, and the criminal might have changed his mind and simply taken the van, letting the mother and child go. Even if he had taken the child, he might later have let the baby go unharmed. Indeed, some conventional wisdom claims that the best approach is not to resist an

  attack. According to a recent Los Angeles Times article, "'active compliance' is the surest way to survive a robbery. Victims who engage in active resistance ... have the best odds of hanging on to their property. Unfortunately, they also have much better odds of winding up dead." 13

  Yet the evidence suggests that the College Park woman probably engaged in the correct action. While resistance is generally associated with higher probabilities of serious injury to the victim, not all types of resistance are equally risky. By examining the data provided from 1979 to 1987 by the Department of Justice's National Crime Victimization Survey, 14 Lawrence Southwick, confirming earlier estimates by Gary Kleck, found that the probability of serious injury from an attack is 2.5 times greater for women offering no resistance than for women resisting with a gun. In contrast, the probability of women being seriously injured was almost 4 times greater when resisting without a gun than when resisting with a gun. In other words, the best advice is to resist with a gun, but if no gun is available, it is better to offer no resistance than to fight. 15

  Men also fare better with guns, but the benefits are significantly smaller. Behaving passively is 1.4 times more likely to result in serious injury than resisting with a gun. Male victims, like females, also run the greatest risk when they resist without a gun, yet the difference is again much smaller: resistance without a gun is only 1.5 times as likely to result in serious injury than resistance with a gun. The much smaller difference for men reflects the fact that a gun produces a smaller change in a man's ability to defend himself than it does for a woman.

  Although usually skewed toward the dramatic, news stories do shed light on how criminals think. Anecdotes about criminals who choose victims whom they perceive as weak are the most typical. While "weak" victims are frequently women and the elderly, this is not always the case. For example, in a taped conversation with police investigators reported in the Cincinnati Enquirer (October 9, 1996, p. B2), Darnell "Bubba" Lowery described how he and Walter "Fatman" Raglin robbed and murdered musician Michael Bany on December 29, 1995:

  Mr. Lowery said on the tape that he and Walter "Fatman" Raglin, w
ho is also charged with aggravated robbery and aggravated murder and is on trial in another courtroom, had planned to rob a cab driver or a "dope boy."

  He said he gave his gun and bullets to Mr. Raglin. They decided against robbing a cab driver or drug dealer because both sometimes carried guns, he said.

  Instead, they saw a man walking across the parking lot with some kind

  INTRODUCTION /5

  of musical instrument. He said as he looked out for police, Mr. Raglin approached the man and asked for money.

  After getting the money, Mr. Raglin asked if the man's car was a stick or an automatic shift. Then Mr. Raglin shot the man.

  Criminals are motivated by self-preservation, and handguns can therefore be a deterrent. The potential defensive nature of guns is further evidenced by the different rates of so-called "hot burglaries," where a resident is at home when a criminal strikes. 16 In Canada and Britain, both with tough gun-control laws, almost half of all burglaries are "hot burglaries." In contrast, the United States, with fewer restrictions, has a "hot burglary" rate of only 13 percent. Criminals are not just behaving differently by accident. Convicted American felons reveal in surveys that they are much more worried about armed victims than about running into the police. 17 The fear of potentially armed victims causes American burglars to spend more time than their foreign counterparts "casing" a house to ensure that nobody is home. Felons frequently comment in these interviews that they avoid late-night burglaries because "that's the way to get shot." 18

  To an economist such as myself, the notion of deterrence—which causes criminals to avoid cab drivers, "dope boys," or homes where the residents are in—is not too surprising. We see the same basic relationships in all other areas of life: when the price of apples rises relative to that of oranges, people buy fewer apples and more oranges. To the non-economist, it may appear cold to make this comparison, but just as grocery shoppers switch to cheaper types of produce, criminals switch to attacking more vulnerable prey. Economists call this, appropriately enough, "the substitution effect."