More Guns Less Crime
Page 22
1
•g> -0.01
I 002 1
■§ -0.03-
8. -0.035-
1
c
< -0.04-
Larceny
Property crime
Auto theft
Burglary
Violent Violent
crime for crime for
counties counties
with more with more
than than
100,000 20,000
Robbery
people
people
Rape
Aggravated assault Crime categories
♦Largest relative increase in crime (smallest relative drop)
effect ▲Largest relative drop in crime (smallest relative increase)
Figure 9.13. Sensitivity of the relationship between right-to-carry laws and annual changes in crime rates: data for counties with either more than 20,000 people or more than 100,000 people (all individual crime categories—that is, all categories except "violent crime"—are for counties with more than 20,000 people)
crimes decline by 2.4 percent, murders by 1.6 percent, rapes and aggravated assaults by over 3 percent, and robberies by 2.7 percent.
With the notable exception of burglaries, which consistently decline, figures 9.10 and 9.11 provide mixed evidence for whether xight-to-carry laws increase or decrease other property crimes. Even when one focuses on estimates of one type, such as those using the percentage of the population with permits, the county- and state-level data yield inconsistent results. Yet while the net effect of right-to-carry laws on larceny and auto theft is not clear, one conclusion can be drawn: the passage of right-to-carry laws has a consistently larger deterrent effect against violent crimes than property crimes and may even be associated with increases in property crimes.
Figures 9.12 and 9.13 limit the sample to the more populous counties and continue reaching very similar results. For counties with more than 20,000 people, the estimate ranges are always of the same sign and have magnitudes similar to those results which examined all the counties. Both figures also looked at the sensitivity of the overall violent-crime rate for counties over 100,000. The range of estimates was again very similar, though they implied a slightly larger benefit than for the more populous counties. For example, figure 9.12 shows that in counties with more than 20,000 people violent crime declines by between 5.4 and 7.4 percentage points for each additional 1 percent of the population with permits, while the analogous drop for counties with more than 100,000 people is between 5.8 and 8.7 percentage points.
A total of 13,312 regressions for the various violent-crime categories are reported in this section. The evidence clearly indicates that right-to-carry laws are always associated with reductions in violent crime, and 89 percent of the results are statistically significant at least at the 1 percent level. The results are not sensitive to including particular control variables and always show that the benefits from these laws increase over time as more people obtain permits. The 8,192 regressions for property crime imply a less consistent relationship between right-to-carry laws and property crime, but even when drops in property crime are observed, the declines are smaller than the decrease in violent crime.
While limiting the sample size to only larger-population counties provides one possible method of dealing with "undefined" arrest rates, it has a serious drawback—information is lost by throwing out those counties with fewer than 20,000 people. Another approach is to control for either the violent- or property-crime arrest rate depending upon whether the crime rate being studied is that of violent or property crime. Even if a county has zero murders or rapes in a particular year, virtually all counties have at least some violent or property crime, thus eliminating the
"undefined" arrest rate problem and still allowing us to account for county-level changes over time in the effectiveness of law enforcement. This approach also helps mitigate any spurious relationship between crime and arrest rates that might arise because the arrest rate is a function of the crime rate. Reestimating the 4,096 regressions in figure 9.10 for murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, auto theft, burglary, and larceny with this new measure of arrest rates again produces very similar results.
City Crime Data
County data, rather than city data, allow the entire country to be examined. This is important, since, obviously, not everyone lives in cities. Such data further allow us to deal with differences in how permits are issued, such as the discretion states grant to local law enforcement. Relying on county data allows a detailed analysis of many important factors, such as arrest and conviction rates, the number of police, expenditures on police, (sometimes) prison sentences, and proxies for policing policies like the so-called broken-windows strategy (according to which police focus on less serious property crimes as a means of reducing overall violent crime). Yet a drawback with county data is that policing policies cannot be dealt with well, for such policy decisions are made at the level of individual police departments—not at the county level. 27 With a few exceptions such as San Francisco, Philadelphia, and New York, where county and city boundaries coincide, only city-level data can be used to study these issues.
The focus of my research is guns and crime, but I had to make sure that I accounted for whatever policing policies are being employed. 28 Three policing strategies dominate the discussion: community-oriented policing, problem-oriented policing, and the broken-windows approach. While community-oriented policing is said to involve local community organizations directly in the policing effort, problem-oriented policing is sometimes viewed as a less intrusive version of the broken-windows policy. Problem-oriented policing began as directing patrols on the basis of identified crime patterns but nowadays involves the police in everything from cleaning housing projects and surveying their tenants to helping citizens design parking garages to reduce auto theft. 29 An extensive West-law database search was conducted to categorize which cities adopted which policing strategies as well as their adoption and rescission dates. 30
Other recent research of mine demonstrates the importance of racial and gender hiring decrees on the effectiveness of police departments. 31 When hiring rules are changed so as to create equal pass rates on hiring
EPILOGUE/ 191
exams across different racial groups—typically by replacing intelligence tests with what some claim are arbitrary psychological tests—the evidence indicates that the quality of new hires falls across the board. And the longer these new hiring policies are in place, the more detrimental the effect on police departments. As with the right-to-carry laws, simple before-and-after trends were included to measure the changing impact of these rules over time.
Let us return to the main focus, guns and crime. To examine the impact of right-to-carry laws, the following list of variables has been accounted for: city population, arrest rate by type of crime, unemployment rate, percentage of families headed by females, family poverty rate, median family income, per-capita income, percentage of the population living below poverty, percentage of the population that is white, percentage that is black, percentage that is Hispanic, percentage that is female, percentage that is less than five years of age, percentage that is between five and seventeen, percentage that is between eighteen and twenty-five, percentage that is between twenty-six and sixty-four, percentage that is sixty-five and older, median population age, percentage of the population over age twenty-five with a high school diploma, percentage of the population over age twenty-five with a college degree, and other types of gun-control laws (waiting periods, background checks, and additional penalties for using guns in the commission of a crime). As with the earlier county- and state-level data, variables are included to measure the length of state waiting periods, as well as the change in average crime rates from state waiting periods, background checks, penalties for using a gun in the commission of crime, and whether the federal Brady law altered existing state rules. Again, all estimates include variables to acc
ount for the average differences across counties and years as well as by year within region.
Table 9.4 provides strong evidence that even when detailed information on policing policies is taken into account, passing concealed-handgun laws deters violent crime. The benefit in terms of reduced murder rates is particularly large, with a drop of 2.7 percent each additional year that the right-to-carry law is in effect. The drop experienced for rapes is 1.5 percent per year. The one violent crime for which the decline is not statistically significant is aggravated assault. On the other hand, property crimes increase after the adoption of right-to-carry laws, confirming some of the earlier findings.
Consent decrees—which mandate police hiring rules that ensure equal pass rates by race and sex—significantly and adversely affect all crime categories but rape. For each additional year that the consent decree is in effect, overall violent crimes rise by 2.4 percent and property crimes rise by 1.9 percent.
Toble 9.4 Accounting for policing policies using city-level doto
Percent change in various crime rates for changes in explanatory variables
Violent
crime Murder
Aggravated Property Auto
Rape Robbery assault crime Burglary Larceny theft
Change in the crime rate from —1.2%**
the difference in the annual
change in crime rates in the
years before and after the
adoption of a right-to-carry
law (annual rate of change
after the law — annual rate
of change before the law) Change in the crime rate after 2.4%*
imposition of a consent
decree regarding the hiring
of police officers Change in the average crime —3.3% a
rate after implementation of
community policing
-2.7%*
0.4%*
2.2%
-1.5%** -1.0%* -0.6% 0.92%** 1.0
-0.27% 3.5%* 1.4%*
1.9%*
0.7%** 1.2%*
2.4%* 2.0%* 0.5%*
rate after implementation of
problem-orientated policing Change in the average crime -0.8% 6.7% c -10.1% a -3.8% 2.3% -6.4% a -5.6% a -12.3% a 18.2% a
rate after implementation of
broken-window policing Average crime rate after 9.3% 14.7% d 6.8% 7.9% d 15.8% c -0.6% 2.7% -4.9% 11%
adoption of one-gun-a-
month purchase rule Change in the average crime 9.6% a 18.4% a 11.9% 4.1% 17.2% a 13% a 10.6% b 14.3% c 11% C
rate in a state after a
neighboring state adopts a
one-gun-a-month rule
•The result is significant at the 1 percent level for a two-tailed t-test. The result is significant at the 5 percent level for a two-tailed t-test. c The result is significant at the 10 percent level for a two-tailed t-test. d The result is significant at the 12 percent level for a two-tailed t-test. *The F-test is significant at the 1 percent level. **The F-test is significant at the 5 percent level. ***The F-test is significant at the 10 percent level.
The evidence for the before-and-after average crime rates for the different types of policing policies is more mixed, and my research does not attempt to deal with issues of why the different rules were adopted to begin with. 32 In ten cases, the policing policies produce significant reductions in crime, but in six cases there are significant increases in crime. Including cases that are not statistically significant still produces no consistent pattern: the policing policies are associated with declines in crime in fifteen cases and increases in twelve cases. A possible explanation for such results might be that adopting new policing policies reallocates resources within the police department, causing some crime rates to go down while others go up. Indeed, each of the three policing policies is associated with increases in some categories of crime and decreases in others. It is difficult to pick out many patterns, but community policing reduces violent crimes at the expense of increased property crimes.
Revisiting Multiple-Victim Public Shootings
Student eyewitnesses and shooting victims of the Pearl High School (Mississippi) rampage used phrases like "unreal" and "like a horror movie" as they testified Wednesday about seeing Luke Woodham methodically point his deer rifle at them and pull the trigger at least six times.... The day's most vivid testimony came from a gutsy hero of the day. Assistant principal Joel Myrick heard the initial shot and watched Woodham choosing his victims. When Woodham appeared headed for a science wing where early classes were already under way, Myrick ran for his pickup and grabbed his .45-caliber pistol. He rounded the school building in time to see Woodham leaving the school and getting into his mother's white Chevy Corsica. He watched its back tires smoke from Woodham's failure to remove the parking brake. Then he ordered him to stop. "I had my pistol's sights on him. I could see the whites of his knuckles" on the steering wheel, Myrick said. He reached into the car and opened the driver-side door, then ordered Woodham to lie on the ground. "I put my foot on his back area and pointed my pistol at him," Myrick testified. 33
Multiple-victim public shootings were not a central issue in the gun debate when I originally finished writing this book in the spring of 1997. My results on multiple-victim public shootings, presented in chapter 5, were obtained long before the first public school attacks occurred in October 1997. Since that time, two of the eight public school shootings (Pearl, Mississippi, and Edinboro, Pennsylvania) were stopped only when citizens with guns interceded. 34 In the Pearl, Missis-
sippi, case, Myrick stopped the killer from proceeding to the nearby junior high school and continuing his attack there. These two cases also involved the fewest people harmed in any of the attacks. The armed citizens managed to stop the attackers well before the police even had arrived at the scene—4!£ minutes before in the Pearl, Mississippi, case and 11 minutes before in Edinboro.
In a third instance, at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, an armed guard was able to delay the attackers and allow many students to escape the building, even though he was assigned to the school because he had failed to pass his shooting proficiency test. The use of homemade grenades, however, prevented the guard from fighting longer. There is some irony in Dylan Klebold, one of the two killers, strongly opposing the proposed right-to-carry law that was being considered in Colorado at the time of the massacre. 35 In the attack on the Jewish community center in Los Angeles in which five people were wounded, the attacker had apparently "scouted three of the West Coast's most prominent Jewish institutions—the Museum of Tolerance, the Skirball Cultural Center and the University of Judaism—but found security too tight." 36
It is remarkable how little public discussion there has been on the topic of allowing people to defend themselves. It has only been since 1995 that we have had a federal law banning guns by people other than police within one thousand feet of a school. 37
Together with my colleague William Landes, I compiled data on all the multiple-victim public shootings occurring in the United States from 1977 to 1995, during which time fourteen states adopted right-to-carry laws. As with earlier numbers reported in this book, the incidents we considered were cases with at least two people killed or injured in a public place. We excluded gang wars or shootings that were by-products of another crime, such as robbery. The United States averaged twenty-one such shootings annually, with an average of 1.8 people killed and 2.7 wounded in each incident.
What can stop these attacks? We examined a range of different gun laws, including waiting periods, as well the frequency and level of punishment. However, while arrest and conviction rates, prison sentences, and the death penalty reduce murders generally, they have no significant effect on public shootings. There is a simple reason for this: Those who commit these crimes usually die in the attack. They are killed in the attack or, as in the Colorado shooting, they commit suicide. The normal penalties simply do not apply.
In the deranged minds of the attackers, the
ir goal is to kill and injure as many people as possible. Some appear to do it for the publicity, which
0.06
-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1012345678 Years before and after adoption of right-to-carry law
Figure 9.14. Murders from multiple-victim public shootings per 100,000 people: data from 1977 to 1995
is related to the harm inflicted. Some may do it only because they value harming others. The best way to prevent these attacks might therefore be to limit the carnage they can cause if they do attack. We find only one policy that effectively accomplishes this: the passage of right-to-carry laws.
When different states passed right-to-carry laws during the nineteen years we studied, the number of multiple-victim public shootings declined by a whopping 84 percent. Deaths from all these shootings plummeted by 90 percent, and injuries by 82 percent. Figure 9.14 demonstrates how the raw number of attacks changes before and after the passage of right-to-carry laws. The extensive research that we have done indicates that these results hold up very well when the long list of factors discussed in this book is taken into account. The very few attacks that still occur in states after enactment of right-to-carry laws tend to occur in particular places where concealed handguns are forbidden, such as schools.
The reason why the deterrent effect on multiple-victim public attacks is greater than on attacks on individual victims is fairly straightforward. Say the probability that a victim has a permitted concealed handgun is 5 percent. That will raise the expected costs to the criminal and produce some deterrence. Yet if one hundred adults are present on a train or in a restaurant, even if the probability that any one of them will be able to
offer a defense is only 5 percent, the probability that at least someone there has a permitted concealed handgun is near 100 percent. 38 The results for multiple-victim public shootings are consistent with the central findings of this book: as the probability that victims are going to be able to defend themselves increases, the level of deterrence increases.