More Guns Less Crime
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8 Do concealed-handgun permit holders pose a risk to others?
But Susan Glick, a researcher for the Violence Policy Center in Washington, a research group that focuses on gun laws found that many people issued concealed-weapons permits in Texas, a state with comparatively
loose gun laws, had run afoul of the law. Some 15 people in Texas out of perhaps 200,000 who were issued permits to carry concealed weapons since 1996 have been charged with murder or attempted murder, Ms. Glick said. (Dirk Johnson, "Divided Missouri to Vote on a Right to Carry Concealed Guns," New York Times, April 2, 1999, p. A16)
In states with lax CCW [concealed carry weapon] laws, hundreds of licensees have committed crimes both before and after their licensure. For example, in Texas, which weakened its CCW law in 1996, the Department of Public Safety reported that felony and misdemeanor cases involving CCW permit holders rose 54.4% between 1996 and 1997. (Douglas Weil, "Carrying Concealed Guns Is Not the Solution," Intellectualcapital.com, March 26, 1998)
Antigun activists complain that no reliable data exists linking concealed weapons to crime because the gun lobby has been successful in hiding it. (James N. Thurman, "As More Carry Hidden Guns, Who's Safer?" Christian Science Monitor, September 1, 1999, p. 1; Thurman was responding to my statement that "The kinds of people who go through the criminal background check and undergo the training aren't the kinds of people who commit the crimes")
The types of people who obtain permits tend to be extremely law abiding. That holds true for Texas as well as other states. Texas issued over 192,000 permits during the first three years of its right-to-carry law, from January 1, 1996, to December 31, 1998. Arrests for crimes "involving a gun" are a particularly misleading statistic, because someone who uses a gun defensively is likely to be arrested except if the police officer was completely sure that the person behaved properly. By March 1999, an Associated Press report stated that "only 515 of the charges ... resulted in convictions, though some were still pending the bulk of the convictions
against licensed concealed-handgun holders were misdemeanors, including 185 for drunken driving and 21 for prostitution. Felonies included 31 convictions for aggravated assault, six for assault causing bodily injury and five for aggravated sexual assault. No licensed handgun holder in Texas has been convicted of murder." 93 Tela Goodwin Mange, a Texas Department of Public Safety spokeswoman, noted that "The fact there are so few incidents relative to the number of people who have concealed handguns is a positive thing."
Doug Weil is indeed correct that Texas experienced a 54 percent increase in arrests between 1996 and 1997, but he fails to mention that the
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number of permits also increased by 50 percent between those two years, thus making the rate at which permit holders were arrested virtually unchanged. Weil's statement also makes it appear that the law changed between the two years, but the Texas law actually went into effect January 1, 1996.
Texas's experience is probably best summarized by Glenn White, president of the Dallas Police Association: "I lobbied against the law in 1993 and 1995 because I thought it would lead to wholesale armed conflict. That hasn't happened. All the horror stories I thought would come to pass didn't happen. No bogeyman. I think it has worked out well, and that says good things about the citizens who have permits. I am a convert." 94
The experience has been similar in other states. The vast majority of revocations involve misdemeanors. Even when gun-related violations occur, the vast majority involve cases like carrying a gun into a restricted area like an airport. There is no evidence that any of these violations amounted to anything more than forgetfulness. The National Journal reported recently that permit holders "turn out to be unusually law-abiding, safer even than off-duty cops." 95
Here are the revocation data for other states:
Alaska. Of the permits issued from January 1, 1995, to August 17, 1999, .3 percent were revoked for any reason. None involved the firing of a gun. 96
Arizona. Of the permits issued between the end of the fall of 1994 and July 31, 1999, .1 percent were revoked, though up to half of these were revocations for "administrative reasons" (such as people dying or saying that they no longer required the permit). 97
Florida. Of the permits issued during October 1, 1987, to February 28, 1999, .2 percent were revoked for any reason. Of these, 113, or .02 percent, were revoked for any type of firearms-related violations, and almost all of these were nonthreatening. 98
Indiana. Of the active permit holders, .16 percent had their permits revoked or suspended for any reason during 1998."
North Carolina. Of the permits issued between December 1, 1995, and August 4, 1999, .3 percent were revoked for any reason. While no detailed records exist for what reasons prompted revocations, those who oversaw the collection of the statistics could not recall hearing of any case of improperly firing a gun. 100
Oklahoma. Of the permits issued from 1996 to August 1999, .1 percent were revoked for any reason. 101 Even these small numbers exaggerate the risks posed by permit holders, for some of these permit holders had their licenses "revoked" simply because they died. The Oklahoma Supreme
Court also recently ruled that the state had improperly revoked some permits for reasons unrelated to one's fitness to carry a concealed handgun.
South Carolina. Of the permits issued from July 1996 to August 16, 1999, .4 percent were revoked for any reason. No violations involved a permit holder firing a gun. Sometimes the reason for the revocation was relatively trivial. For instance, one person lost his permit for not keeping his gun properly hidden—he was not wearing a shirt so the gun could be seen extending above his pants' waistband.
Utah. Of the permits issued between the summer of 1994 and July 1999, .4 percent were revoked for any reason. Of these revocations, 80 percent resulted from drunk driving. No violations involved the firing of a gun by a permit holder in Utah. 102
Wyoming. Of the permits issued during fall 1994 to July 1999, .2 percent were revoked for any reason. James M. Wilson, the supervisor for the permitting program, stated that "Revocations did not include any cases of discharging of a firearm." 103
9 Are the CBS and Voter News Service polls accurately reflecting how gun ownership rates vary across states?
Douglas Weil: But the most important information is that the Voter News Service, which conducted the 1996 poll has said the poll cannot be used in the manner Dr. Lott used it. It cannot be used to say anything about gun ownership in any state, and it cannot be used to compare gun ownership to the earlier 1988 voter poll. ("More Guns, Less Crime? A Debate between John Lott, Author of More Guns, Less Crime, and Douglas Weil, Research Director of Handgun Control, Inc.," an on-line debate sponsored by Time magazine, transcript from July 1, 1998)
Statistics from the CBS and Voter News Service exit polls (discussed in chapters 3 and 5) were originally "weighted" by these organizations to reflect the share of different racial, sex, and age groups in the national population. For example, white females between thirty and thirty-nine make up 6 percent of the population but may end up accounting for a larger percentage of those surveyed in a poll. If white females in that age group are overrepresented in the calculations made to determine what voters support, the poll will not accurately reflect how voters as a whole will vote in an election. To correct this, polls were adjusted so that different groups are weighted according to their actual shares of either the voting or the general population. It is therefore necessary for the researcher to use a state's demographics to adjust that state's poll results
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himself, because the shares that different groups make of state populations differ from their shares of the national population. That is precisely what I did.
There were also differences in how the 1988 and 1996 surveys were phrased, and I already discussed those biases right at the beginning of chapter 3. In the notes accompanying that discussion, I mentioned that these biases do not appreciably affect changes in survey
results between these two years. The important point is that the changes in how the questions were worded should not alter the relative ranking of states or what types of people are more likely to own guns. Regressions using data from the two years used variables that account for the average difference across years as well as the average differences across states to account for any biases.
10 Have I ignored the costs of gun violence?
He ignores the huge cost on medical systems that gun violence causes. (Steve Young of the Bell Campaign, an anti-gun group, as quoted in Frank Main, "Economist Says Guns Fight Crime," Chicago Sun-Times, July 8, 1999, p. 6)
The costs of crime include medical or other costs of crime like lost time from a job or replacement costs for damage and replacement costs for items taken or destroyed. I do not ignore such costs. But unlike my critics, neither do I ignore the crimes that are stopped because people are able to defend themselves. The net effect is what is relevant, and that is directly measured by what happens to the number of crimes. To the extent that people commit crimes with permitted concealed handguns, the number of crimes will rise. To the extent that such handguns deter criminals, the number of crimes will decline. When criminals substitute different types of crimes, the issue then is how the medical and other costs of those different crimes compare. As to the costs of different crimes, I relied on a study produced the National Institute of Justice, rather than produce my own independent numbers.
An interesting contrast to my work is a recent paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association which claimed to show that there were "$2.3 billion in lifetime medical costs for people shot in 1994." Jens Ludwig, one of the authors of the study, argues that "cities such as Chicago could use the study in their lawsuits against the gun industry." 104 But the correct question is not whether guns involve medical costs but whether total medical costs are greater with or without guns. The logic is akin to determining whether police should be allowed to carry guns
only by looking at the number of wrongful shootings, and not the times that guns are used to protect officers or deter criminals. Eliminating guns will not eliminate violence and the costs associated with those attacks. Indeed, from a historical perspective, murder rates were higher in England before guns were invented. Medical costs also include costs from suicides and attempted suicides, and the evidence discussed in chapter 5 indicates that suicides will still occur at pretty much the same rate even if guns are not present. For example, crashing one's car in an attempt to kill oneself can produce substantial medical costs, but even methods like overdosing on sleeping pills or slitting one's wrists with a knife involve medical costs.
11 What happens to the evidence when Florida and counties with fewer than 100,000 people are removed from the sample?
Lott does not respond to Black and Nagin's finding that excluding Florida and small counties (with population less than 100,000) from his samples destroys the statistical significance of all of the violent-crime categories except assault. This suggests that Lott's results are not as robust as he claims. True, Lott's thesis is not embarrassed by varying degrees of deterrence across states (especially since he shows that this variance may be related to the number of permits issued). However, his thesis is shaken by the considerable number of state specific crime categories where concealed-handgun laws are associated with an increase in crime and where the overall significance of his results is undermined by the exclusion of Florida and small counties. (Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue HI, "Nondiscretionary Concealed Weapons Laws: A Case Study of Statistics, Standards of Proof, and Public Policy," American Law and Economics Review 1, nos. 1-2 [Fall 1999]: 463)
I thought that I had dealt with this issue in the book. Dropping all counties with fewer than 100,000 people plus Florida reduces the significance in regressions that examine only the average crime rates before and after the law is adopted. Making these changes increases the impact of the law when one examines the before-and-after trends. As the careful reader might guess, the reason that the before-and-after average is not significant for some crimes is that dropping all these observations actually causes the changes to look more like the inverted V that we have so frequently discussed. Picking and choosing which observations to include, which single specification to report, and even which crime categories to report (Black and Nagin do not report the overall violent-crime rates) allows them to knock down the significance of two of the crime categories. (By any standards that I know, a t-statistic of 1.9 for robberies is still
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statistically significant at better than the 5 percent level, and their coefficient still implies a drop in before-and-after averages of 4.6 percent.) Dropping 87 percent of the sample and reporting only the specifications examining the before-and-after averages may be Black and Nagin's preferred sample and specification, but even these results imply significant benefits and no cost from passing right-to-carry laws. If they had reported the overall violent-crime rate, they would have shown that overall violent crime fell after the right-to-carry laws were passed.
Table 9.7 provides uses the updated data to examine the importance of dropping out counties with fewer than 100,000 people as well as Florida. The impact of the law is greater for overall violent-crime rates and aggravated assaults and smaller for the other three violent-crime categories. Each additional year after the law goes into effect produces an additional 3 percent drop in violent-crime rates.
When Black and Nagin break down the differences by individual states, they claim to find three crime categories in which one of the ten states had a statistically significant increase in crime rates (West Virginia for murder, Mississippi for rape, and Pennsylvania for robbery). But their results do not show the variation across states, for they are derived from only a small subset of observations from those states. The West Virginia sample included only one of its fifty-five counties, as it was the only one with more than 100,000 people. The Mississippi data included just three of its eighty-two counties. The results reported earlier in table 4.9 provide the information on how the right-to-carry laws affected the crime rates across states.
12 Are the results valid only when Maine and Florida are included?
I will try to summarize the argument here. Ian Ayres and John Donohue are concerned about the inclusion of Maine and Florida for several reasons: (1) the results discussed by Black and Nagin, (2) the issue of whether the crack epidemic might have just happened to cause the relative crime rates to rise in non-right-to-carry states in the late 1980s, and (3) objections to whether Cramer and Kopel were correct in classifying Maine as a right-to-carry state. To satisfy their concerns, Ayres and Donohue use several different approaches, such as dropping both Maine and Florida out of the sample. They also divide the shall-issue dummy variable into two separate variables: a variable to measure the average before-and-after crime rates for those states that adopted their right-to carry laws before December 1987 (Maine and Florida) and a similar variable to measure the average before-and-after crime rates for those states that adopted their crime rates after December 1987.
Table 9.7 What is the impact of removing both counties with fewer than 100,000 people and Florida from the sample?
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 the difference in the annual change in crime rates in the years before and after the adoption of the right-to-carry law (annual rate of change after the law — annual rate of change before the law)
-3.3%* -0.45%*
-2.6%** -3.0%*
-4.7%*
-0.8%
-2.1%*
-0.24% -1.8%**
*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 F-test is significant a
t the 15 percent level.
Ayres and Donohue find that violent-crime rates consistently fall in states adopting right-to-carry laws after 1987, but the effect is often statistically insignificant. The drops in violent crime appear much larger and more significant for the earlier states. Indeed, as reported earlier in this book, Maine and Florida experience two of the three largest overall drops in violent crime (see table 4.9). Yet the focus on the before-and-after averages again obscures the benefits from right-to-carry laws.
The results presented in table 9.8 take the two approaches that I have been using: the estimated number of permits issued in a state and the differences between the trends in crime rates before and after the adoption of the right-to-carry laws. With the exception of rape, Maine and Florida experience greater drops in all violent-crime categories, but all the violent-crime rates decline for states adopting right-to-carry laws during the post-1987 period and all but two of these declines are statistically significant at least at the 10 percent level. The estimates using the percentage of the population with permits imply that there were no statistically different effects for the two sets of states for murder and rape.
13 Was it proper to assume that more permits were issued in the more populous counties after right-to-carry laws were adopted?
Since the links between the issuance of permits and the crime reduction that Lott attributes to the shall issue laws is so crucial to establishing causality, more research on this issue is needed. Lott's county population proxies rely on his assumption that population density is a good predictor of the difficulty in obtaining permits under discretionary laws. However, if many states went directly from prohibiting concealed weapons to a non-discretionary law (like Arizona), Lott's assumed relationship between permits and density would break down. (Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue III, "Nondiscretionary Concealed Weapons Laws: A Case Study of Statistics, Standards of Proof, and Public Policy," American Law and Economics Review 1, nos. 1-2 [Fall 1999]: 446)