More Guns Less Crime

by John R. Lott Jr

The benefits of concealed handguns are not limited to those who use them in self-defense. Because the guns may be concealed, criminals are unable to tell whether potential victims are carrying guns until they attack, thus making it less attractive for criminals to commit crimes that involve direct contact with victims. Citizens who have no intention of ever carrying concealed handguns in a sense get a "free ride" from the crime-fighting efforts of their fellow citizens. However, the "halo" effect created by these laws is apparently not limited to people who share the characteristics of those who carry the guns. The most obvious example is the drop in murders of children following the adoption of nondiscretionary laws. Arming older people not only may provide direct protection to these children, but also causes criminals to leave the area.

  Nor is the "halo" effect limited to those who live in areas where people are allowed to carry guns. The violent-crime reduction from one's own state's adopting the law is in fact greatest when neighboring states also allow law-abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns. The evidence also indicates that the states with the most guns have the lowest crime rates. Urban areas may experience the most violent crime, but they also have the smallest number of guns. Blacks may be the racial group most vulnerable to violent crime, but they are also much less likely than whites to own guns.

  These estimates make one wonder about all the attention given to other types of gun legislation. My estimates indicate that waiting periods and background checks appear to produce little if any crime deterrence. Yet President Clinton credits the Brady law with lowering crime because it has, according to him, been "taking guns out of the hands of criminals." 5 During the 1996 Democratic National Convention, Sarah Brady, after whose husband the bill was named, boasted that it "has helped keep more than 100,000 felons and other prohibited purchasers from buying handguns." 6 From 1994 until the Supreme Court's decision in 1997, backers of the Brady law focused almost exclusively on the value of background checks, the one part of the law that the Supreme Court specifically struck down. 7

  Actually, the downward crime trend started in 1991, well before the Brady law became effective in March 1994. With a national law that goes into effect only once, it is difficult to prove empirically that the law was what altered crime rates, because so many other events are likely to have occurred at that same time. One of the major advantages of the large data set examined in this book is that it includes data from many different states that have adopted nondiscretionary laws in many different years.

  Others estimate a much smaller effect of the Brady law on gun sales. In 1996 the General Accounting Office reported that initial rejections based on background checks numbered about 60,000, of which over half were for purely technical reasons, mostly paperwork errors that were eventually corrected. 8 A much smaller number of rejections, 3,000, was due to convictions for violent crimes, and undoubtedly many of the people rejected proceeded to buy guns on the street. By the time the background-check provision was found unconstitutional, in June 1997, only four people had gone to jail for violations.

  Presumably, no one would argue that rejected permits are meaningful by themselves. They merely proxy for what might happen to crime rates, provided that the law really stops criminals from getting guns. Do criminals simply get them from other sources? Or do the restrictions primarily

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  inconvenience law-abiding citizens who want guns for self-defense? The results presented in this book are the first systematic national look at such gun laws, and if the national Uniform Crime Report data through 1994 or state waiting periods and background checks are any indication, the empirical evidence does not bode well for the Brady law. No statistically significant evidence has appeared that the Brady law has reduced crime, and there is some statistically significant evidence that rates for rape and aggravated assault have actually risen by about 4 percent relative to what they would have been without the law.

  Yet research does not convince everybody. Perhaps the Supreme Court's June 1997 decision on the constitutionality of the Brady law's national background checks will shed light on how effective the Brady law was. The point of making the scope of the background check national was that without it, criminals would buy guns from jurisdictions without the checks and use them to commit crimes in the rest of the country. As these national standards are eliminated, and states and local jurisdictions discontinue their background checks, 9 will crime rates rise as quickly without this provision of the law as gun-control advocates claimed they fell because of it? My bet is no, they will not. If President Clinton and gun-control advocates are correct, a new crime wave should be evident by the time this book is published.

  Since 1994, aside from required waiting periods, many new rules making gun ownership by law-abiding citizens more difficult have come into existence. There were 279,401 active, federal gun-dealer licenses in the nation when the new licensing regulations went fully into effect in April 1994. By the beginning of 1997 there were 124,286, a decline of 56 percent, and their number continues to fall. 10 This has undoubtedly made purchasing guns less convenient. Besides increasing licensing fees from $30 to $200 for first-time licenses and imposing renewal fees of $90, the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act imposed significant new regulatory requirements that were probably much more important in reducing the number of licensees. 11

  The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) supports this decrease largely because it believes that it affects federal license holders who are illegally selling guns. The BATF's own (undoubtedly high) estimate is that about 1 percent of federal license holders illegally sell guns, and that this percentage has remained constant with the decline in licensed dealers. 12 If so, 155,115 licensees have lost their licenses in order to eliminate 1,551 illegal traffickers. Whether this lopsided trade-off justifies stiffer federal regulation is unclear, but other than simply pointing to the fact that crime continued on its downward course nationally during this

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  period, no evidence has been offered. No attempt has been made to isolate this effect from many other changes that occurred over the same period of time. 13

  Changes in the law will also continue to have an impact. Proposals are being made by the U.S. Department of Justice to "require owners of firearms 'arsenals' to provide notice to law enforcement," where the definition of what constitutes an "arsenal" seems to be fairly subjective, and to "require gun owners to record the make, model, and serial number of their firearms as a condition of obtaining gun insurance." Other proposals would essentially make it impossible for private individuals to transfer firearms among themselves.

  It is too early to conclude what overall impact these federal rules have had on gun ownership. Surely the adoption of the Brady law dramatically increased gun ownership as people rushed out to buy guns before the law went into effect, 14 and the evidence discussed in chapter 3 also indicates that gun ownership increased dramatically between 1988 and 1996. But without annual gun-ownership data, we cannot separate all the different factors that have altered the costs and benefits of gun ownership.

  Other changes are in store during the next couple of years that could affect some of the discussion in this book. The Clinton administration has been encouraging the development of devices for determining at a distance what items a person is carrying. 15 Such devices will enable police to see whether individuals are carrying guns and can help disarm criminals, 16 but criminals who managed to acquire them could also use them to determine whether a potential victim would offer armed resistance. The ability to target unarmed citizens would lower the risks of committing crime and reduce the external benefits produced by concealed handguns. Since both police and criminals might use them, the net effect on crime rates of their use is not immediately clear.

  Yet governmental use of these detection devices is not a foregone conclusion. Before granting the government the right to use such long-range devices, we must answer some novel questions regarding constituti
onal rights. For example, would the ability to take a picture of all the objects that a person is carrying amount to an invasion of privacy? Would it constitute an illegal search? 17

  What implications does this study have for banning guns altogether? This book has not examined evidence on what the crime rate would be if all guns could be eliminated from society—no data were present in the data set for areas where guns were completely absent for any period of time, but the findings do suggest how costly the transition to that gun-free goal would be. If outlawing guns would primarily affect their

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  ownership by law-abiding citizens, this research indicates that at least in the short run, we would expect crime rates to rise. The discussion is very similar to the debate over nuclear disarmament. A world without nuclear weapons might be better off, but unilateral disarmament may not be the best way to accomplish that goal. The large stock of guns in the United States, as well as the ease with which illegal items such as drugs find their way across borders implies that not only might the transition to a gun-free world be costly (if not impossible), but the transition might also take a long time.

  Further, not everyone will benefit equally from the abolition of guns. For example, criminals will still maintain a large strength advantage over many of their victims (such as women and the elderly). To the extent that guns are an equalizer, their elimination will strengthen criminals relative to physically weak victims. As we have seen in discussing international crime data, eliminating guns alters criminals* behavior in other ways, such as reducing their fear of breaking into homes while the residents are there.

  All these discussions, of course, ignore the issues that led the founding fathers to put the Second Amendment in the Constitution in the first place—important issues that are beyond the scope of this book. 18 They believed that an armed citizenry is the ultimate bulwark against tyrannical government. Possibly our trust in government has risen so much that we no longer fear what future governments might do. Having just fought a war for their independence against a government that had tried to confiscate their guns, the founding fathers felt very strongly about this issue.

  What Can We Conclude?

  How much confidence do I have in these results? The largest previous study on gun control produced findings similar to those reported here but examined only 170 cities within a single year. This book has examined over 54,000 observations (across 3,000 counties for eighteen years) and has controlled for a range of other factors never accounted for in previous crime studies. I have attempted to answer numerous questions. For example, do higher arrest or conviction rates reduce crime? What about changes in other handgun laws, such as penalizing the use of a gun in the commission of a crime, or the well-known waiting periods? Do income, poverty, unemployment, drug prices, or demographic changes matter? All these factors were found to influence crime rates, but no previous gun study had accounted for changing criminal penalties, and this study is the first to look at more than a few of any of these other considerations. Preventing law-abiding citizens from carrying handguns does not end

  violence; it merely makes victims more vulnerable to attack. While people have strong views on either side of this debate, and one study is unlikely to end this discussion, the size and strength of my deterrence results and the lack of evidence that holders of permits for concealed handguns commit crimes should at least give pause to those who oppose concealed handguns. In the final analysis, one concern unites us all: Will allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns save lives? The answer is yes, it will.

  Nine Epilogue

  The Fear of Guns

  A real fear about guns exists these days. Recently, I was picked up by a taxicab driver who told me that his wife had taken his gun and destroyed it. He had owned the gun for over twenty-five years and had served in the military, but his wife hadn't talked to him before she destroyed it. With all the news coverage on the shootings, accidental gun deaths, and murders committed with guns, his wife was simply terrified about keeping the gun in the home any longer. He hadn't tried to replace it, simply because his wife's opposition was so "emotional" and "strong" that it simply didn't make any sense to argue with her. Having served in the military, the cab driver had no problem with guns, but his wife had always refused to touch the weapon. In fact, he wasn't even sure how it had been possible for her to touch the gun long enough to get it removed from the house. The driver was concerned about crime and had kept the gun around the home for self-protection, and he had made that argument to her. But he described how his wife was fearful that there would be an accident with the gun.

  His story reminded me of my own wife's feelings about guns. Before I had started this research, my home had been a "gun-free zone." More than banning real guns, however, my wife had insisted that our children not even play with toy guns because she didn't want her children growing up to be comfortable even around toy guns. I had never felt strongly enough about the issue to argue with her; indeed, it had never occurred to me even to bother arguing with her. I understood the cab driver's reaction to his wife's throwing out his gun—you pick your fights in a relationship; you simply don't bother arguing about something that you don't really care a lot about when your partner feels so intensely about the issue. However, since my research into this area we have indeed purchased a gun.

  Unfortunately, the cab driver's experience is not that unusual. A researcher at the University of Chicago Medical School called me about the harassment that her husband—a police officer and federally licensed firearms dealer—was facing from the city council in Muncie, Indiana.

  Her husband sold only about ten to twelve guns a year to other police officers, and she said that with the high licensing fees, he was losing money doing this. He simply did it as a service for the other police officers. In any case, the city council was claiming that he had not filled out the proper forms notifying them that he was a dealer. He denies this and faces fines and a possible loss of his license. The city council was apparently concerned about accidental gun deaths that might arise from the guns that he sold.

  The wife of a fellow economist recently went to a doctor's office at the University of Chicago hospital, where she was asked to fill out the typical forms about past medical history. One question asked whether she owned a gun. When the doctor saw that she had answered yes, the doctor warned her about the dangers of having a gun in the home and said that she hoped that she had it locked up. The wife countered: "Wouldn't that defeat the whole point of having a gun?" The doctor then said, "Yes I guess it would, but I'm required to tell you that."

  Sharon Stone, the movie actress, made headlines by publicly announcing her decision to give up her guns "even though she once saved her life by pointing a loaded shotgun at a crazed stalker" after three telephone calls to 911 failed to get the police to arrive. She decided that with all the recent violence and accidents involving guns she was afraid of having guns in her home. 1 Another reaction is the suspension from school of sixth-graders for accidentally having a squirt gun in their backpacks. 2

  President Clinton puts forward a program to spend $15 million to buy guns from people living in cities. Andrew Cuomo, the secretary of housing and urban development, warns that "reducing guns reduces crime. We know that. Reducing guns also reduces the number of accidents that occur.... It reduces the number of suicides through guns." 3

  Newsweek recently devoted a special issue to guns and violence. 4 Despite thirty-four pages on the topic, the notion of defensive gun use was not mentioned even once. ABC's Nightline has had guests advising people not to use firearms for self-defense and instead suggesting, "We would recommend and possibly assist with a review of the security of the building and if necessary recommend further security to attend the house if they require it." 5 Yet we are not indoors all the time, and even being inside does not guarantee protection.

  With all the news coverage of only the bad things that happen with guns and the constant drumbeat of cl
aims from the Clinton administration, I can understand the public's reaction to guns. 6

  The news is also filled with brutal crimes against women, but none of the mainstream media mention the possibility of women getting guns to defend themselves. The assumption that the police will always be avail-

  able to protect us collides directly with the horrible event that is being covered on the news. What should people do when the police are not able to be there? By contrast, when bad events happen with guns the question that is normally asked is: Are more gun controls needed? No one asks: Did banning guns from certain areas make the law-abiding citizens more vulnerable?

  The following sections will examine new data on concealed-handgun laws and ask whether many of the new proposed reforms ranging from safe-storage laws to one-gun-a-month rules will save lives. I then respond to the criticisms made after my book was published.

  Updating the Basic Results

  I started this research several years ago with data from 1977 to 1992, all the county data that were available at that time. When the book was first published, I had updated the data through 1994. It is now possible to expand the data even further, through 1996. This is quite important, since so many states very recently have passed right-to-carry laws. During 1994, Alaska, Arizona, Tennessee, and Wyoming enacted new right-to-carry laws, and during 1995, Arkansas, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, and Utah followed suit. 7 Between 1977 and 1996 a total of twenty states had changed their laws and had them in effect for at least one full year. 8

  Some commentators complained that even though my study was by far the largest statistical crime study ever, there was simply not enough data to properly evaluate the impact of the laws. Others suspected that the findings were simply a result of studying relatively unusual states. 9 Another criticism was that poverty was not properly accounted for. 10

  While the methods I used in the book were by far the most comprehensive that I know of, I have continued to look into other methods. By putting together an entirely new data set—using city-level information—it is possible to go beyond my previous efforts to control for policing-policy variables such as arrest and conviction rates, number of police per-capita, expenditures on police per capita, and a proxy for the so-called broken-windows policing policy. The city-level data that I have now compiled include direct information on whether a city has adopted community policing, problem-oriented policing, and/or the broken-windows approach.