More Guns Less Crime

by John R. Lott Jr

  Handgun Control examined the change in violent crime between only two years, 1992 and 1997, and strangely enough they chose to classify states according to what their laws were in 1997, at the end of the period. This odd classification makes a considerable difference, for some states'

  right-to-carry laws did not even go into effect until late 1996, with few permits issued until 1997. It makes no sense to attribute the increase in crime to a law for the five years before the law goes into effect. A third of the states with right-to-carry laws did not enact them until after late 1995. Of course, the way any trained researcher would approach the question is to separate the change in crime rates before and after the different states changed their laws. That is only common sense. Only changes in crime after the law goes into effect can be attributed to the passage of the law.

  Given the evidence in this book, I would also argue that since one is examining the change in crime rates it is important to separate out those states that have had changes in permits and those that have not. If a state has had its right-to-carry law in place for decades, it is extremely unlikely that it will be experiencing any additional growth in permits and thus it should not be expecting any additional changes in its crime rates from this law. Handgun Control also did not account for any other factors that could have influenced crime. Nor did they even classify states consistently across their own press releases issued within months of each other. 65

  During the Missouri campaign, many reporters called me up to comment about the "FBI numbers" on crime rates. 66 When I would point out that the claim was actually based on a report produced by Handgun Control, they said that they didn't know what to do with the conflicting claims. Editorials and news stories in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Kansas City Star normally just accepted the Handgun Control assertion as established truth.

  After repeatedly encountering this response from reporters, I started suggesting to reporters that they ask some local academic (a statistician, criminologist, or economist) to evaluate the two conflicting claims. One reporter with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Kim Bell, expressed the concern that they might run into a professor with a preconceived bias and that would make the test unfair. I told her that I was willing to take that risk, but that if she were concerned about that problem, she could always approach a few different academics. Others who refused to take me up on this challenge included Bill Freivogel, deputy editor at the Post-Dispatch, and Rich Hood, an editor at the Kansas City Star. Rather, their newspapers simply presented Handgun Control's claims as fact.

  Criticisms of the Book

  Some reviewers clearly have not even bothered to read my book, or at least it didn't matter to them whether they read it. A review in the British Journal of Criminology claimed that "there is nothing in Lott's study to con-

  nect this more general information to the specific county-based data on the issuing of concealed-carry permits," "Lott is dealing with a time frame entirely prior to the introduction of the non-discretionary concealed-carry laws in most of the states which now have them," and "he has preoccupied himself exclusively with 'good guns' owned by 'good people.'" 67 Another book review, in the New England Journal of Medicine, starts off by falsely claiming that I "approvingly" quote Archie Bunker's suggestion to stop airplane hijacking by arming "all the passengers." 68

  As of this writing (September 1999), Handgun Control's Web site still continues to assert the same "major criticisms" of my research—"where are the robbery effects?" "auto theft as a substitute for rape," "Lott fails to account for other initiatives—including other gun control laws," "Lott fails to account for cyclical changes in crime rates"—and the same claims about misclassifying state laws. 69 Ironically, they also continue citing the McDowall et. al. (1995) study that we discussed in chapter 2, which examined a total of only five counties picked from three states, attempted to account for no other factors that might be changing over the same period of time, and examined only murders with guns. 70

  Time magazine reported that "Other critics raise questions about whether Lott massaged the numbers. One arcane quarrel: for statistical purposes, Lott dropped from his study sample any counties that had no reported murders or assaults for a given year." 71 It also said that "the book does not account for fluctuating factors like poverty levels and policing techniques." After the story on my book ran, I called up the reporter, Romesh Ratnesar, and said that I knew that he had read the book carefully, so I was surprised that he would write these claims as if they were true. I, as well as critics like Black and Nagin, had looked at the evidence once arrest rates were excluded so as to include those counties with zero arrest rates. What was particularly disappointing was that I had spent the time to obtain all the data that were available. The county-level data were used for all the years and for all the counties for which they were available, both when I did the original paper and when I wrote the book. As to the other claim, I had measures of poverty and policing techniques like the broken-window strategy included.

  While I appreciated that the Time magazine piece was published, claims that "the book does not account" for these factors are clearly wrong. Ratnesar agreed that these issues were dealt with in the book, but that his role was not to serve as a "referee" between the two sides. His job was to report what the claims were. 72

  I keep on being amazed at the absolute faith that so many news media people place in the gun-control organizations and the "facts" issued by them. Take another example: Molly Ivins, a syndicated columnist, as-

  serted that "[Lott] himself admits, he didn't look at any other causative factors—no other variables, as they say." 73 She also argued that "Lott's study supposedly showed that when 10 Western states passed 'right-to-carry' laws between 1985 and 1992, they had less violent crime" and that "according to the author's research, getting rid of black women older than 40 would do more to stop murder than anything else we could try." Syndicated columnist Tom Teepen wrote a very similar column a year earlier in which he also claimed that this book "failed to consider other anti-crime variables in making its cause-and-effect claims, a fundamental gaffe." 74

  I did get a chance to talk with Mr. Teepen, and he told me that he wrote his review without even reading the book. He apparently relied on conversations that he had with people at Handgun Control and the Violence Policy Center. When I talked to Cynthia Tucker, an editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where Mr. Teepen is based, about having a letter responding to the charges Mr. Teepen made, she found it "unbelievable" that he would have written the review without first looking at the book. She grudgingly said that if it were true, they would publish as a response a short letter, but that she would have to check into it first. Needless to say, the newspaper published my letter the following Sunday. 75 In contrast, unfortunately, Ms. Ivins never returned my telephone calls or responded to my E-mail messages and never corrected her claims. 76

  Undoubtedly, some of the claims constitute simple mistakes, but more than a few reflect columnists and others being too quick to accept whatever gun-control groups tell them. I will spare the reader the long list of other false claims reported in the press. 77 Yet, obviously, many people, particularly those with gun-control organizations, continually make statements that they know are false—safe in the knowledge that only a tiny fraction of readers or listeners ever check the assertions. Unfortunately, the gun-control organizations risk losing significant credibility only with the few who read the book. 78

  Other critiques by academics and the media—some old, some new— require more in-depth discussions. The rest of this section reviews the critiques and then provides my responses.

  1 How do we know that these findings are not a result of the normal ups and downs in crime rates?

  The central problem is that crime moves in waves, yet Lott's analysis does not include variables that can explain these cycles. (David Hemenway, "Book Review of More Guns, Less Crime? New England Journal ofMedicine, December 31, 1998)

  Jens Ludwig, assista
nt professor of public policy at Georgetown University, argued that Lott's data don't prove "anything about what laws do to crime." He noted that crime rates, including homicide, are cyclical: They rise and fall every five to 10 years or so in response to forces that are not well understood. Ludwig suggested that this pattern explains the apparent effectiveness of concealed weapons laws. Imagine, he said, a state where the murder cycle is on the upswing and approaching its peak and public concern is correspondingly high. Then a particularly ghastly mass shooting occurs. Panicked legislators respond by passing a law that allows equally panicked citizens to carry concealed weapons. A year or two later, the murder rate goes down, as Lott's study found. (Richard Morin, "Guns and Gun Massacres: A Contrary View," Washington Post, May 30, 1999, p. B5)

  Lott's variables are not good predictors of crime waves. Nor does he provide for any effect of history in the way he models crime. For example, the year 1982 could as well follow 1991 as 1981 in his analyses. (David Hemenway, "More Guns, Less Crime," New England Journal of Medicine, May 20, 1999)

  Even my most determined critics concede one point: violent-crime rates fell at the point in time that the right-to-carry laws went into effect. The real question is: Why did the crime rates fall? Do these laws simply happen to get passed right when crime rates hit their peaks? Why don't we observe this coincidence of timing for other gun-control laws?

  It is logically possible that such coincidental timing could take place. But there is more evidence besides decreases in crime after right-to-carry laws are adopted. First, the size of the drop is closely related to the number of permits issued (as indicated in the first edition and confirmed by the additional data shown here). Second, the new evidence presented here goes even further: it is not just the number of permits, but also the type of people who obtain permits that is important. For example, high fees discourage the poor, the very people who are most vulnerable to crime, from getting permits. Third, if it is merely coincidental timing, why do violent-crime rates start rising in adjacent counties in states without right-to-carry laws exactly when states which have adopted right-to-carry laws are experiencing a drop in violent crime?

  Finally, as the period of time studied gets progressively longer, the results are less likely to be due to crime cycles, since any possible crime "cycles" involve crime not only going down but also "up." If crime happened to hit a peak, say, every ten years, and right-to-carry laws tended to be passed right at the peak, then the reported effect of the law would spuriously show a negative impact right after the enactment. However,

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  five years after that an equally large positive spurious effect on crime would have to show up. Instead, my results reveal permanent reductions in crime that only become larger with time, as more people acquire concealed-carry permits.

  Furthermore, my study accounted for possible crime cycles in many ways: individual year variables accounted for average national changes in crime rates, and different approaches in chapter 4 controlled for individual state and county time trends and did not take away the effects of concealed carry. To the contrary, they resulted in similar or even stronger estimates for the deterrence effect. Other estimates used robbery or burglary rates to help account for any left-out factors in explaining other crime rates. Since crime rates generally tend to move together, this method also allows one to detect individual county trends. In updating the book, I have included estimates that account for the separate average year-to-year changes in five different regions in the country. Despite all these additional controls the deterrence effect continues to show up strongly.

  It is simply false to claim, "nor does he provide for any effect of history," as I have variables that account for "changes" in crime rates from previous years. I have variables that measure explicitly the number of years that the law has been in effect as well as the number of years until it goes into effect. In addition, I have used individual state linear time trends that explicitly allow crime rates to change systematically over time.

  Earlier discussions in chapter 7 on crime cycles (pp. 130—31) and causality (pp. 152—54) also explain why these concerns are misplaced.

  2 Does it make sense to control for nonlinear time trends for each state?

  The results suggest that the Lott and Mustard model, which includes only a single national trend, does not adequately capture local time trends in crime rates. To test for this possibility, we generalized the Lott and Mustard model to include state-specific trends in an effort to control for these unobserved factors. ... we report the results for models with a quadratic time trend. The only significant impact estimate is for assaults, and its sign is positive, not negative. (Dan Black and Dan Nagin, "Do Right-to-Carry Laws Deter Violent Crime?" Journal ofLegal Studies, January 1998, p. 218)

  Much more was controlled for than "a single national trend" in my study (e.g., as just mentioned above, state and county trends as well as other crime rates). While it is reasonable to include individual linear state trends or nonlinear trends for regions, including nonlinear trends for in-

  dividual states makes no sense. The approach by Black and Nagin is particularly noteworthy because it is the one case in which an academic study has claimed that a statistically significant, even if small, increase in any type of violent crime (aggravated assault) occurs after the law.

  Consider a hypothetical case in which the crime rate for each and every state follows the pattern that Black and Nagin found in their earlier paper and that I showed in this book (discussed in chapter 7, pp. 136-37): crime rates were rising up until the law went into effect and falling thereafter. Allowing a separate quadratic time trend for each state results in the time trend picking up both the upward path before the law and the downward path thereafter. If the different state crime patterns all peaked in the year in which their state law went into effect, the state-specific quadratic trends would account for all the impact of the law. A variable measuring the average crime rates before and after the law would then no longer reflect whether the law raised or lowered the crime rate. 79 This is analogous to the "dubious variable" problem discussed earlier. If enough state-specific trends are included, there will be nothing left for the other variables to explain.

  If shall-issue laws deter crime, we would expect crime rates to rise until the law was passed and then to rise more slowly or to fall. The effect should increase over time as more permits are issued and more criminals adjust to the increased risks that they face. But the quadratic specification used by Black and Nagin replicates that pattern, state by state. Their results show not that the effect from the quadratic curve is insignificant, but that the deviation of the law's effect from a quadratic curve over time is generally insignificant.

  To see this more clearly, take the hypothetical case illustrated in figure 9.15, in which a state faced rising crime rates. 80 The figure shows imaginary data for crime in a state that passed its shall-issue law in 1991. (The dots in the figure display what the crime rate was in different years.) The pattern would clearly support the hypothesis that concealed-handgun laws deter violent crime, but the pattern can easily be fitted with a quadratic curve, as demonstrated with the curved line. There is no systematic drop left over for any measure of the right-to-carry law to detect— in terms of the figure, the difference between the dots and the curved line shows no particular pattern.

  Phrased differently, the deterrence hypothesis implies a state-specific time pattern in crime rates (because different states did or did not pass shall-issue laws, or passed them at different dates). All Black and Nagin have shown is that they can fit such a state-specific pattern with a state-specific quadratic time trend, and do this well enough that the residuals no longer show a pattern.

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  Year

  83 85 87 89 91 93 95 97 Right-to-carry law passes in 1991

  Figure 9.15. Fitting a nonlinear trend to individual states

  3 Should one expect an immediate and constant effect from right-to-carry laws wi
th the same effect everywhere?

  While he includes a chapter that contains replies to his critics, unfortunately he doesn't directly respond to the key Black and Nagin finding that formal statistical tests reject his methods. The closest he gets to addressing this point is to acknowledge "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," but then goes on to say that he has "presented over a thousand [statistical model] specifications" that reveal "an extremely consistent pattern" that right-to-carry laws reduce crime. Another view would be that a thousand versions of a demonstrably invalid analytical approach produce boxes full of invalid results. (Jens Lud-wig, "Guns and Numbers," Washington Monthly, June 1998, p. 51) 81

  We applied a number of specification tests suggested by James J. Heckman and V. Joseph Hotz. The results are available from us on request. The specifics of the findings, however, are less important than the overall conclusion that is implied. The results show that commonly the model either overestimates or underestimates the crime rate of adopting states in the years prior to adoption. (Dan Black and Dan Nagin, "Do Right-to-Carry Laws Deter Violent Crimel" Journal of Legal Studies, January 1998, p. 218)

  Black and Nagin actually spent only a few brief sentences on this issue at the very end of their paper. Nevertheless, I did respond to this general point in the original book. Their test is based upon the claim that I believe "that [right-to-carry] laws have an impact on crime rates that is constant over time." 82 True, when one looks at the simple before-and-after average crime rates, as in the first test presented in table 4.1 and

  Crime rate before law

  Crime rate after law

  -5 -4

  -10 12 3 4 5

  Years before and after implementation of the law