More Guns Less Crime
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The simplest point to make, however, is that excluding the arrest rate does not alter the findings regarding concealed handguns. Reestimating the regressions in tables 4.1 and 4.3 for the same samples and control variables produces virtually identical results. Ironically, two of my strongest critics, Dan Black and Dan Nagin, also tried excluding the arrest rates, and they admitted in early drafts of their paper that their results agreed with ours: "The inclusion of the arrest-rate variable has very little impact on the coefficient estimates of the right-to-carry laws." 29
14 Are the graphs in this book misleading?
Lott rebuts many of the criticisms of his study by pointing to his simple but misleading graphs. The graphs are visually compelling yet very deceptive. What is not obvious to the casual observer of the graphs is that each data point represents an aggregate average for states that liberalized their gun-carrying laws, but the states that make up the average are not the same each year. Lott examined 10 states he claims adopted "shall-issue" concealed-gun-carrying laws during his sample period. For many of the states studied, data were available for only one to three years after the laws were implemented. (Webster, "Flawed")
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The graphs presented in the paper do indeed represent the average changes in crime rates before and after the implementation of these laws. The graphs consistently show that violent-crime rates are rising before these laws go into effect and falling afterward. Since some states only adopted nondiscretionary, "shall-issue" laws toward the end of the sample period, it was not possible to examine all the states for the same number of years after the laws were implemented. I disagree that this is "misleading" or "deceptive." The results were by no means generated by the aggregation itself, and anybody doubting the meaning of the graph can examine the regression results. Since the regressions already control for each county's average crime rate, any changes refer to deviations from that county's average crime rate. 30
Ian Ayres and Steven Levitt use similar graphs and find similar results when they look at the deterrent effect of Lojack antitheft devices on cars (these are radio tracking devices that can be activated by police when a car is stolen). 31 In many ways, the theoretical deterrent effect of these devices is the same as that of concealed handguns: because the device is small and easy to hide, a criminal cannot easily know whether a car has the tracking device until the police arrive.
Future studies will be able to track these changes in crime over longer periods of time because more states will have had right-to-carry laws for longer periods of time. Such studies will ultimately help to test my findings. I have used all the data that was available at the time that David Mustard and I put this data set together. With 54,000 observations and hundreds of variables available over the 1977 to 1994 period, it is also by far the largest data set that has ever been put together for any study of crime, let alone for the study of gun control. 32 1 find it ironic that my study is attacked for not having enough data when these same researchers have praised previous studies that relied on much shorter time periods for a single state or a few counties. For example, Mr. Webster expresses no such criticism when referring to a study conducted by the University of Maryland. Yet that study analyzed merely five counties and covered a shorter period of time after the law was enacted. 33
15 Should concealed-handgun laws have differential effects on the murder rates of youths and adults. ?
Ludwig points out that in many states only adults may carry concealed weapons. So, according to Lott's deterrence theory, adults should be safer than young people. But this hasn't happened, Ludwig says. (Kathleen Schalch describing Jens Ludwig's arguments on Morning Edition, National Public Radio, 10:00 a.m. ET Tuesday, December 10, 1996.)
As noted in chapter 4,1 tested the hypothesis that murder rates would be lower for adults than for adolescents under nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws, and reported the results in the original paper. However, the results did not bear out this possibility. Concealed-handgun laws reduce murder rates for both adults and for adolescents. One explanation may simply be that young people also benefited from the carrying of concealed handguns by adults. Several plausible scenarios may explain this. First, criminals may well tend to leave an area where law-abiding adults carry concealed handguns, and since all age groups live in the same neighborhood, this lowers crime rates for all population groups. Second, when gun-carrying adults are physically present, they may able to protect some youngsters in threatening situations.
Could some other factor be lowering the juvenile murder rate— something that is unrelated to concealed handguns? Perhaps, despite all the factors accounted for, the results of any research may be affected by unknown factors. But it is wrong to conclude, as Ludwig does, that "these findings are not consistent with the hypothesis that shall-issue laws decrease crime through a deterrence effect." 34
16 Are changes in the characteristics of victims consistent with the theory?
Lott and Mustard offer data on the character of victims in homicide cases. They report (astonishingly) that the proportion of stranger killings increases following the enactment of right-to-carry laws, while the proportion of intrafamily killings declines. That right-to-carry laws deter in-trafamily homicides more than they deter stranger homicides is inconceivable. (Albert W. Alschuler, "Two Guns, Four Guns, Six Guns, More: Does Arming the Public Reduce Crime?" Valparaiso University Law Review 31 (1997): 369)
Josh Sugarmann of the Violence Prevention Center noted that most murders are committed by people who know each other. "Concealed-weapons laws are not passed to protect people from people they know," Sugarmann said. (Doug Finke, "Sides Stick to Their Guns, Concealed-Carry Bill Set for Showdown in General Assembly," Springfield State Journal-Register, March 31, 1997, p. 1)
As noted in the first chapter, the category of acquaintance murder is extremely broad (encompassing shootings of cab drivers, gang members, drug dealers or buyers, and prostitutes or their clients). For the Chicago data that we discussed, the number of acquaintance murders involving friends was actually only a small percentage of the total number of acquaintance murders. If the breakdown found for Chicago provides even
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the remotest proxy for the national data, it is not particularly surprising that the relative share of acquaintance murders involving friends should rise, because we expect that many of the murders in this category are unlikely to be affected by law-abiding citizens carrying concealed handguns. Family members may also find that concealed handguns protect them from other estranged family members. A wife seeking a divorce may find that a concealed handgun provides her protection against a husband who is unwilling to let go of the relationship, and attacks by such people do not always take place in a home. Surely there are many cases of spousal abuse where women fear for their lives and find that a handgun provides them with a significant degree of protection.
A recent case involving a woman who used a handgun to protect herself from an abusive husband created an important new legal precedent in California: for the first time, women are now allowed to use self-defense before they suffer serious blows. The San Francisco Examiner reported as follows:
[Fay] Johnson, a 47-year-old mother of four, said that on July 2, 1995, she feared her 62-year-old husband, Clarence, would beat her as he always did after a weekend of drinking and hanging out with his motorcycle buddies.
She had overspent her budget on supplies for a Fourth of July barbecue and didn't have dinner ready, and the house was not clean—so when she heard her husband's motorcycle pull into the driveway, she decided to take matters into her own hands.
Johnson said she grabbed a loaded gun ... [and fired, ] hitting her husband five times. He survived and testified against her. She was arrested and spent 21 months in prison until her acquittal.
"I regret being in jail, but I just wouldn't tolerate it anymore," said Johnson, a friendly, articulate woman who is celebrating her freedom with
her children and six grandchildren. "It would have been suicide."
Johnson said she had endured nearly 25 years of mental and physical abuse at the hands of her husband, whose usual form of punishment was slamming her head into a wall. The beatings got so bad, she said, that she had to be hospitalized twice and tried getting counseling until he found out and forced her to stop. She said the pressure of the abuse had culminated that fateful day. 33
Pointing to women who use handguns to protect themselves from abusive husbands or boyfriends in no way proves that the primary effects of concealed-handgun laws will involve such uses of guns, but these cases should keep us from concluding that significant benefits for these women are "inconceivable."
With reference to Alschuler's discussion, however, two points must be
made clear. First, the diverse breakdown of these groupings makes it difficult to predict on theoretical grounds how the number of murders among family members, acquaintances, strangers, or unknown cases should necessarily change relative to each other. Second, as Alschuler himself has noted, these estimates are suggestive; they are not statistically significant, in that we cannot say with much certainty how concealed-handgun laws have affected the proportions of victims across the categories mentioned above.
An additional response should be made to Sugarmann's claims. Even if one accepts the claim that nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws do not reduce the number of murders against people who know each other (and I do not concede this), what about other types of murders, such as those arising from street robbery? For Chicago during the period from 1990 to 1995, 16 percent of all murders involved nonacquaintance robbery. Moreover, one must ask about nonfriend acquaintance murders (excluding prostitution, gang, and drug cases), murders by complete strangers, and at least some of those murders still classified as mysteries (an additional 22 to 46 percent of all murders). Since permitted handguns are virtually never used in crimes against others and they do not produce accidental deaths, should not the reduction of these other types of murders still be deemed important? 36
17 Do nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws only affect crimes that occur in public places?
Handguns were freely available for home and business use in all the "shall-issue" jurisdictions prior to the new laws. The new carrying privilege would thus not affect home or business self-defense but should have most of its preventive impact on street crime and offenses occurring in other public places. But the study contains no qualitative analysis of different patterns within crime categories to corroborate the right-to-carry prevention hypothesis. (Zimring and Hawkins, "Counterfeit Deterrent," p. 54)
Contrary to the claim of Zimring and Hawkins, concealed handguns may very well affect crime in homes and businesses in several ways. First, being allowed to carry a concealed gun outside is likely to increase the number of guns owned by law-abiding citizens. Since these guns will be kept at least part of the time in the home, this should have a deterrent effect on crimes committed at home and also at one's business. Second, as some of the evidence suggests, nondiscretionary laws could even increase the number of crimes that occur in the home as criminals turn away from other crimes, like street robbery, for which the risks that crim-
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inals face have gone up. These two effects would thus work in opposite directions. Finally, to the extent that nondiscretionary handgun laws drive criminals out of a certain geographical area, rates for all types of crimes could fall.
Aggregation of the crime categories makes it difficult to separate all the different substitution effects. Still, the results presented here are very consistent with the two primary dimensions that we focused on: whether there is contact between the criminal and the victim, and whether the crime occurs where law-abiding citizens could already legally carry a gun.
18 Is it reasonable to make comparisons across states?
The sort of state that passes a "shall-issue" law in the 1980s is apt to be the same kind of place where ordinary citizens carrying concealed firearms might not be regarded as a major problem even before the law changed.... Idaho is not the same sort of place that New York is, and there seem to be systematic differences between states that change standards for concealed weapons and those that do not. (Zimring and Hawkins, "Counterfeit Deterrent," pp. 50—51)
The observed drop in crime rates in states that have enacted nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws does not by itself imply that we will observe the same effect in other states that adopt such laws later. Several different issues arise here. First, the regressions used in this book have attempted to control for many differences that can explain the level of crime (for example, income, poverty, unemployment, population and population density, demographic characteristics, law enforcement, other gun laws). Admittedly, even my long list of variables does not pick up all the differences between states, which is the reason that a variable is added for each county or state to pick up the average differences in crime rates across places. Individual time trends are also allowed for each state.
Yet despite all these attempts to control for variables, some caution is still in order—especially when dealing with areas that are particularly extreme along dimensions that do not have obvious counterparts in areas with nondiscretionary laws. One obvious example would be New York City. While the regression results show that areas with the largest and most dense populations gain the most from nondiscretionary laws, there is always the possibility that the relationship changes for values of population and density that are different from those in places where we have been able to study the effects of these laws. To date, the fourth and fifth largest cities in the country have passed nondiscretionary laws (Houston
and Philadelphia), and additional experience with large cities may help determine whether these laws would be equally useful in a city like New York. If one were skeptical about the effects in large cities, the laws should first be changed in Los Angeles and Chicago.
A second issue is whether there is something unique about states that have adopted nondiscretionary laws, and whether that characteristic caused them not only to adopt the laws but also reduced the potential problems resulting from adoption. For example, if local legislators in a few states had special information confirming that the citizens in their state were uniquely trustworthy with regard to concealed handguns, that might have led these few states to pass the laws and have little difficulty with them. It could then "falsely" appear that nondiscretionary laws are generally successful. Such an argument may have been plausible at one time, but its force has declined now that such large and varied areas are covered by these laws. Equally important is the fact that not all jurisdictions have willingly adopted these laws. Many urban areas, such as Atlanta and Philadelphia, fought strongly against them, but lost out to coalitions of rural and suburban representatives. Philadelphia's opposition was so strong that when Pennsylvania's nondiscretionary law was first passed, Philadelphia was partially exempted.
19 Does my discussion provide a "theory" linking concealed-handgun ownership to reductions in crime? Do the data allow me to link the passage of these laws with the reduction in crime?
Two idiosyncratic aspects of the Lott and Mustard analysis deserve special
mention In the first place, there is very little in the way of explicit
theory advanced to explain where and when right-to-carry laws should operate as deterrents to the types of crime that can be frustrated by citizens carrying concealed handguns.... They have no data to measure the critical intermediate steps between passing the legislation and reductions in crime rates. This is the second important failing ... that is not a recurrent feature in econometric studies. (Zimring and Hawkins, "Counterfeit Deterrent," pp. 52, 54)
This set of complaints is difficult to understand. The theory is obvious: A would-be criminal act is deterred by the risk of being shot. Many different tests described in this book support this theory. Not only does the drop in crime begin when nondisc
retionary laws are adopted, but the extent of the decline is related to the number of permits issued in a state. Nondiscretionary laws reduce crime the most in areas with the greatest increases in the number of permits. As expected, crimes that involve criminals and victims in direct contact and crimes occurring in places where
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the victim was previously unable to carry a gun are the ones that consistently decrease the most.
20 What can we infer about causality?
Anyone who has taken a course in logical thinking has been exposed to the fallacy of arguing that because A happened (in this case, passage of a concealed-weapon law) and then B happened (the slowing of the rate of violent crime), A must surely have caused B. You can speculate that the passage of concealed-gun legislation caused a subsequent slowing of the rate of violent crime in various states, but you certainly can't prove it, despite the repeated claims that a University of Chicago law professor's "study" has offered "definitive scholarly proof." (Harold W. Andersen, "Gun Study Akin to Numbers Game," Omaha World Herald, April 3, 1997, p. 15)
An obvious danger arises in inferring causality because two events may coincide in time simply by chance, or some unknown factor may be the cause of both events. Random chance is a frequent concern with pure time-series data when there is just one change in a law. It is not hard to believe that when one is examining a single state, unrelated events A and B just happened to occur at the same time. Yet the data examined here involve many different states that changed their laws in many different years. The odds that one might falsely attribute the changes in the crime rate to changes in the concealed-handgun laws decline as one examines more experiences. The measures of statistical significance are in fact designed to tell us the likelihood that two events may have occurred randomly together.