More Guns Less Crime

by John R. Lott Jr

  The more serious possibility is that some other factor may have caused both the reduction in crime rates and the passage of the law to occur at the same time. For example, concern over crime might result in the passage of both concealed-handgun laws and tougher law-enforcement measures. Thus, if the arrest rate rose at the same time that the concealed-handgun law passed, not accounting for changes in the arrest rate might result in falsely attributing some of the reduction in crime rates to the concealed-handgun law. For a critic to attack the paper, the correct approach would have been to state what variables were not included in the analysis. Indeed, it is possible that the regressions do not control for some important factor. However, this study uses the most comprehensive set of control variables yet used in a study of crime, let alone any previous study on gun control. As noted in the introduction, the vast majority of gun-control studies do not take any other factors that may influence crime into account, and no previous study has included such variables as the arrest or conviction rate or sentence length.

  Other pieces of evidence also help to tie together cause and effect. For example, the adoption of nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws has not produced equal effects in all counties in a state. Since counties with easily identifiable characteristics (such as rural location and small population) tended to be much more liberal in granting permits prior to the change in the law, we would expect them to experience the smallest changes in crime rates, and this is in fact what we observe. States that were expected to issue the greatest number of new permits and did so after passing nondiscretionary laws observed the largest declines in crime. We know that the number of concealed-handgun permits in a state rises over time, so we expect to see a greater reduction in crime after a nondiscretionary law has been in effect for several years than right after it has passed. Again, this is what we observe. Finally, where data on the actual number of permits at the county level are available, we find that the number of murders declines as the number of permits increases.

  The notion of statistical significance and the number of different specifications examined in this book are also important. Even if a relationship is false, it might be possible to find a few specifications out of a hundred that show a statistically significant relationship. Here we have presented over a thousand specifications that together provide an extremely consistent and statistically significant pattern about the relationship between nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws and crime.

  21 Concerns about the arrest rates due to missing observations

  To control for variation in the probability of apprehension, the [Lott and Mustard] model specification includes the arrest ratio, which is the number of arrests per reported crime. Our replication analysis shows that the inclusion of this variable materially affects the size and composition of the estimation data set. Specifically, division by zero forces all counties with no reported crimes of a particular type in a given year to be dropped from the sample for that year. [Lott's and Mustard's] sample contains all counties, regardless of size, and this problem of dropping counties with no reported crimes is particularly severe in small counties with few crimes. The frequencies of missing data are 46.6% for homicide, 30.5% for rape, 12.2% for aggravated assault, and 29.5% for robbery. Thus, the [Lott and Mustard] model excludes observations based on the realization of the dependent variable, potentially creating a substantial selection bias. Our strategy for finessing the missing data problem is to analyze only counties maintaining populations of at least 100,000 during the period 1977 to

  1992 Compared to the sample [comprising] all counties, the missing

  data rate in the large-county sample is low: 3.82% for homicide, 1.08% for

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  rape, 1.18% for assault, and 1.09% for robberies. (Dan Black and Daniel Nagin, "Do 'Right-to-Carry' Laws Deter Violent Crime*" Journal of Legal Studies 27 [January 1998], forthcoming)

  The arguments made by Black and Nagin have changed over time, and some of their statements are not consistent. 37 In part because of the public nature of their attacks, I have tried to deal with all of the different attacks, so that those who have heard them may hear my responses. The problem described immediately above by Black and Nagin is indeed something one should be concerned about, but I had already dealt with the problem of missing observations in the original paper, and I discuss it again here at the end of chapter 6. My original paper and chapter 4 also reported the results when the arrest rate was removed entirely from the regressions. The discussion by Black and Nagin exaggerates the extent of the problem and, depending on the crime category being examined, quite amazingly proposes to solve the missing data problem by throwing out data for between 77 and 87 percent of the counties.

  Black and Nagin present a very misleading picture of the trade-offs involved with the solution that examined the more populous counties. 38 The relevant comparison is between weighted numbers of missing observations, not the total number of missing observations, since the regressions are weighted by county population and the missing observations tend to be from relatively small counties, which are given a smaller weight. 39 When this is done, the benefits obtained by excluding all counties with fewer than 100,000 people become much more questionable. The most extreme case is for aggravated assault, where Black and Nagin eliminate 86 percent of the sample (a 29 percent drop in the weighted frequency) in order to reduce weighted missing values from 2.8 to 1.5 percent. Even for murder, 77 percent of the sample is dropped, so that the weighted missing data declines from 11.7 to 1.9 percent. The rape and robbery categories lie between these two cases, both in terms of the number of counties with fewer than 100,000 people and in terms of the change in the amount of weighted missing data. 40

  Why they choose to emphasize the cut-off that they did is neither explained nor obvious. The current cost-benefit ratio is rather lopsided. For example, eliminating counties with fewer than 20,000 people would have removed 70 percent of the missing arrest ratios for murder and lost only 20 percent of the observations (the weighted frequencies are 23 and 6 percent respectively). There is nothing wrong with seeing whether the estimates provide the same results over counties of various sizes, but if that is their true motivation for excluding portions of the data, it should be clearly stated.

  Despite ignoring all these observations, it is only when they also remove the data for Florida that they weaken my results for murder and rape (though the results for aggravated assault and robbery are even larger and more statistically significant). Only eighty-six counties with more than 100,000 people adopted nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws between 1977 and 1992, and twenty of these counties are in Florida. Yet after all this exclusion of data, Black and Nagin still find no evidence that allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns increases crime, and two violent-crime categories show a statistically significant drop in crime. The difference between their approach and mine is rather stark: I did not select which observations to include; I used all the data for all the counties over the entire period for which observations were available.

  22 What can we learn about the deterrent effect of concealed handguns from this study?

  The regression study [that Lott and Mustard] report is an all-or-nothing proposition as far as knowledge of legal impact is concerned. If the model is wrong, if their bottom-line estimates of impact cannot withstand scrutiny, there is no intermediate knowledge of the law's effects on behavior that can help us sort out the manifold effects of such legislation. As soon as we find flaws in the major conclusions, the regression analyses tell us nothing. What we know from this study about the effects of "shall-carry" laws is, therefore, nothing at all. (Zimring and Hawkins, "Counterfeit Deterrent," p. 59)

  Academics can reasonably differ about what factors account for changes in crime. Sociologists and criminologists, for example, have examined gun control without trying to control for changes in arrest or conviction rates. Others might be particularly concerned about the impact of drug
s on crime. Economists such as myself try to include measures of deterrence, though I am also sympathetic to other concerns. In this book and my other research, my approach has not been to say that only one set of variables or even one specification can explain the crime rate. My attitude has been that if someone believes that a variable is important and has any plausible reason for including it, I have made an effort to include it. This book reports many different approaches and specifications—all of which support the conclusion that allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns reduces crime. I believe that no other study on crime has used as extensive a data set as was used here, and no previous study has attempted to control for as many different specifications.

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  23 Summarizing the concerns about the evidence that concealed-handgun laws deter crime

  The gun lobby claims to have a new weapon in its arsenal this year—a study by economist John Lott. But the Lott study shoots blanks. In reviewing Lott's research and methodology, Carnegie-Mellon University Profs. Daniel Nagin and Dan Black, and Georgetown University's Prof, fens Ludwig corrected for the many fatal flaws in Lott's original analysis and found no evidence of his claim that easing restrictions on carrying concealed handguns leads to a decrease in violent crime. Nagin, Black, and Ludwig recently concluded in a televised debate with Lott that "there is absolutely no credible evidence to support the idea that permissive concealed-carry laws reduce violent crime," and that "it would be a mistake to formulate policy based on the findings from Dr. Lott's study." (fames Brady, "Concealed Handguns; Putting More Guns on Streets Won't Make America Safer," Minneapolis Star Tribune, March 21, 1997, p. 21A)

  Unlike the authors of past papers on gun control such as Arthur Kel-lermann and the authors of the 1995 University of Maryland study, I immediately made my data available to all academics who requested it. 41 To date, my data have been supplied to academics at twenty-four universities, including Harvard, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, Emory, Vanderbilt, Louisiana State, Michigan State, Florida State, the University of Texas, the University of Houston, the University of Maryland, Georgetown, and the College of William and Mary.

  James Brady's op-ed piece ignores the fact that some of these academics from Vanderbilt, Emory, and Texas paid their own way to attend the December 9,1996, debate sponsored by his organization—Handgun Control. While Handgun Control insisted on rules that did not allow these academics to participate, I am sure that they would have spoken out to support the integrity of my original study.

  Those who have attempted to replicate the findings in the original Journal of Legal Studies paper have been able to do so, and many have gone beyond this to provide additional support for the basic findings. For example, economists at Vanderbilt University have estimated over 10,000 regressions attempting to see whether the deterrent effects of nondiscre-tionary laws are at all sensitive to all possible combinations of the various data sets on demographics, income, population, arrest rates, and so on. Their results are quite consistent with those reported in this book. 42

  I have tried in this chapter to examine the critiques leveled against my work. In many cases, the concerns they describe were addressed in the original paper. In others, I believe that relatively simple responses exist

  to the complaints. However, even taking these critics at their worst, I still believe that a comment that I made at the December 9 discussion sponsored by Handgun Control still holds:

  Six months ago, who would have thought that Handgun Control would be rushing out studies to argue that allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns would have no effect, or might have a delayed impact, in terms of dropping crimes? (Morning Edition, National Public Radio, 10:00 a.m. ET, December 10, 1996.

  Eight

  .Some Final Thoughts

  As more than 30 diners sat in Sam's St. John's Seafood [in Jacksonville, Florida] about 7:20 p.m., a masked man entered the eatery and ordered everyone to the floor, said co-owner Sam Bajalia. The man grabbed waitress Amy Norton from where she and another waitress were huddled on the floor and tried to get her to open the cash register.

  At that point, [Oscar] Moore stood up and shot him. Another diner ... pulled out a .22-caliber derringer and fired at the man as he ran out of the restaurant. At least one shot hit the fleeing robber.

  [The robber was later arrested when he sought medical care for his wound.] ...

  "I'm glad they were here because if that girl couldn't open the register, and he didn't get [any] money, he might have started shooting," Bajalia said. 1

  [It was] 1:30 a.m. when Angelic Nichole Hite, 26, the night manager, and Victoria Elizabeth Shaver, 20, the assistant manager at the Pizza Hut at 4450 Creedmoor Road, were leaving the restaurant with Marty Lee Hite, 39, the manager's husband. He had come to pick her up after work.

  They saw a man wearing a ski mask, dark clothes, gloves, and holding a pistol walking toward them, and the Hites ran back inside the restaurant. Shaver apparently had reached her car already.... The couple couldn't close the door behind them because the robber ran up and wedged the barrel of his handgun in the opening. As they struggled to get the door closed,... the masked man twice said he would kill them if they didn't open it.

  Marty Hite, who carried a .38-caliber handgun, pulled out his weapon and fired three times through the opening, striking the robber in the abdomen and upper chest. The would-be bandit

  160/CHAPTER EIGHT

  staggered away, and the Hites locked the door and called police.

  The Wake County district attorney will review the shooting, but Raleigh police did not file charges against the manager's husband. Police said it appeared the couple retreated as far as they could and feared for their lives, which would make it a justified shooting. 2

  Many factors influence crime, with arrest and conviction rates being the most important. However, nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws are also important, and they are the most cost-effective means of reducing crime. The cost of hiring more police in order to change arrest and conviction rates is much higher, and the net benefits per dollar spent are only at most a quarter as large as the benefits from concealed-handgun laws. 3 Even private, medium-security prisons cost state governments about $34 a day per prisoner ($12,267 per year). 4 For concealed handguns, the permit fees are usually the largest costs borne by private citizens. The durability of guns allows owners to recoup their investments over many years. Using my yearly cost estimate of $43 per concealed handgun for Pennsylvanians, concealed handguns pay for themselves if they have only %&5 of the deterrent impact of an additional year in prison. This calculation even ignores the other costs of the legal system, such as prosecution and defense costs—criminals will expend greater effort to fight longer prison sentences in court. No other government policy appears to have anywhere near the same cost-benefit ratio as concealed-handgun laws.

  Allowing citizens without criminal records or histories of significant mental illness to carry concealed handguns deters violent crimes and appears to produce an extremely small and statistically insignificant change in accidental deaths. If the rest of the country had adopted right-to-carry concealed-handgun provisions in 1992, about 1,500 murders and 4,000 rapes would have been avoided. On the other hand, consistent with the notion that criminals respond to incentives, county-level data provide some evidence that concealed-handgun laws are associated with increases in property crimes involving stealth and in crimes that involve minimal probability of contact between the criminal and the victim. Even though both the state-level data and the estimates that attempt to explain why the law and the arrest rates change indicate that crime in all the categories declines, the deterrent effect of nondiscretionary handgun laws is largest for violent crimes. Counties with the largest populations, where the deterrence of violent crimes is the greatest, are also the counties

  SOME FINAL THOUGHTS/161

  where the substitution of property crimes for violent crimes by crimina
ls is the highest. The estimated annual gain in 1992 from allowing concealed handguns was over $5.74 billion.

  Many commonly accepted notions are challenged by these findings. Urban areas tend to have the most restrictive gun-control rules and have fought the hardest against nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws, yet they are the very places that benefit the most from nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws. Not only do urban areas tend to gain in their fight against crime, but reductions in crime rates are greatest precisely in those urban areas that have the highest crime rates, largest and most dense populations, and greatest concentrations of minorities. To some this might not be too surprising. After all, law-abiding citizens in these areas must depend on themselves to a great extent for protection. Even if self-protection were accepted, concerns would still arise over whether these law-abiding citizens would use guns properly. This study provides a very strong answer: a few people do and will use permitted concealed handguns improperly, but the gains completely overwhelm these concerns.

  Another surprise involves women and blacks. Both tend to be the strongest supporters of gun control, yet both obtain the largest benefits from nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws in terms of reduced rates of murder and other crimes. Concealed handguns also appear to be the great equalizer among the sexes. Murder rates decline when either more women or more men carry concealed handguns, but the effect is especially pronounced for women. An additional woman carrying a concealed handgun reduces the murder rate for women by about three to four times more than an additional man carrying a concealed handgun reduces the murder rate for men. Providing a woman with a concealed handgun represents a much larger change in her ability to defend herself than it does for a man.