More Guns Less Crime
Page 27
The original tests shown in figures 4.1 and 4.2 were based upon conversations that I had had with state officials in nondiscretionary states. If the state officials' claims were correct that high-population counties had been much more restrictive in issuing permits than low-population counties, adoption of right-to-carry laws would have seen the biggest issuance of permits in these counties and thus the biggest drops in crime. The results confirmed this prediction. Obviously, this claim depends upon all the states switching from discretionary to nondiscretionary laws, and indeed all the states examined for the tests shown in these earlier figures did make that change. None of the states during 1977—1992
Table 9.8 Reexamining the claim that states adopting the law before and after December 1987 were differently affected by right-to-carry laws
Percent change in various crime rates for changes in explanatory variables
Violent
crime Murder
Aggravated Property Auto
Rape Robbery assault crime Burglary Larceny theft
States adopting law prior to December 1987: one-percentage-point change in the share of the state population with permits to carry concealed handguns
States adopting law after December 1987: one-percentage-point change in the share of the state population with permits to carry concealed handguns
States adopting law prior to December 1987: change in the crime rate from the difference in the annual change in crime rates in the
-15.8% a -5A% b
-4.1% a
-2.7% a
-72%* -92%*
-3.9% d -9.1%' -19.1% a -15.5% a -6.1% a -22.6% a -8.9% a
-5.0" -1.056 -7.*
4.856* -2.056* 8.756* 0.34%
-0.9% -7.1%* -5.7%* -2.4%* -1.1% -4.1%* -4.1%*
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) States adopting law after -1.7%* -0.7%*** -3.3%* -2.9%* -2.4%* -0.7*% -2.4%* 0.5%* -1.4%*
December 1987: 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)
a The result is significant at the 1 percent level for a two-tailed t-test. b 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 F-test is significant at the 15 percent level.
switched from not issuing any permits to nondiscretionary rules. Arizona made its change in late 1994.
The updated results in the epilogue have continued to remain conscious of this issue, and I found that the more populous counties in states that changed from discretionary to nondiscretionary laws had bigger relative drops in violent-crime rates than states that changed from banning concealed handguns to nondiscretionary laws.
14 Did the passage of right-to-carry laws result in more guns being carried in public places^
Perhaps by "more guns," Lott means more guns carried in public places. However, surveys indicate that 5-11% of US adults admit to carrying guns, dwarfing the 1% or so of the population that obtained concealed-weapon permits.... And if those who got permits were merely legitimating what they were already doing before the new laws, it would mean there was no increase at all in carrying or in actual risks to criminals. One can always speculate that criminals' perceptions of risk outran reality, but that is all this is—a speculation. More likely, the declines in crime coinciding with relaxation of carry laws were largely attributable to other factors not controlled in the Lott and Mustard analysis. (Tim Lambert, "Do More Guns Cause Less Crime?" from his posting on his Web site at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales [http:// www.cse. unsw.EDU AU/~lambert/guns/lott/])
The survey results mentioned by Lambert refer to all transportation or carrying of guns by Americans. They include not only carrying concealed handguns (whether legally or illegally) but also people who have guns with them to go hunting or who may simply be transporting guns between residences. 105 On the other hand, any survey that focused solely on the illegal carrying of concealed handguns prior to the adoption of the law would find it difficult to get people to admit that they had been violating the law.
The 1 percent figure Lambert picks for carrying concealed handguns is also very misleadingly low. As I have shown in this book, permitting rates depend upon many factors (such as the level of fees and the amount of training required), but they also depend crucially on the number of years that the permitting rules have been in effect. The longer the amount of time that the rules are in effect, the more people who obtain permits. Not everyone who will eventually obtain a permit will apply for it immediately. With the large number of states that have only recently granted permits to people it is misleading to think that the current per-
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mit rate tells us the rate at which people in those states will be carrying concealed handguns even a few years from now.
Given how extremely law abiding these permit holders tend to be, it seems doubtful that most people carrying concealed handguns with permits were illegally carrying concealed handguns before the passage of the right-to-carry law. In many states, illegally carrying a concealed weapon would be the type of violation that would prevent people from ever even getting a permit. There is no evidence that these permit holders have violated this particular law. Yet even if as many as 10 percent of permit holders had previously been illegally carrying a concealed handgun, the coefficients from table 9.3 would still imply that for every 900 additional people with permits there are 0.3 fewer murders and 2.4 fewer rapes.
Finally, while the evidence linking the rate at which permits are issued and the drops in crime rates is important, it is only one portion of the evidence. For example, if there was no change in the number of people carrying concealed handguns, why did violent-crime rates in neighboring counties without the law increase at the same time that they were falling in neighboring counties with the right-to-carry law?
15 Shouldn't permit holders be required to have the same type of training as police officers?
Proponents of [right-to-carry] legislation contend that citizens will be adequately trained to handle firearms responsibly, but this is rarely true. Police departments require officers to go through a great deal of safety and proficiency training before issued a gun—followed by regular refresher courses and qualifications throughout the officer's career. Citizens armed under the provisions of non-discretionary carry laws are not so highly trained, and frequently not trained at all, thereby further increasing the risk of injury and death with a firearm. (From the Web page of Handgun Control, Inc., entitled "Will the Real John Lott Please Stand Up>")
Police officers face a much more difficult job than citizens with concealed handguns. An officer cannot be satisfied if the criminal runs away after he brandishes a gun. Instead, police must act offensively, which is much more dangerous. Citizens are rarely put in situations that require the skill of pursuing an attacker.
There are both costs and benefits to training. Yet the question is ultimately an empirical one. Training requirements improve the deterrence effect for concealed-handgun laws, but the effects are small. What I do find is that longer training periods reduce the number of people ob-
taining permits, and the net effect of increased training is clearly to reduce the deterrent effect of adopting right-to-carry laws.
16 Where does the academic debate stand?
In at least six articles published elsewhere, 10 academics found enough serious flaws in Lott's analysis to discount his findings completely. (David Hemenway, "Book Review of More Guns, Less Crime" New England Journal of Medicine, D
ecember 31, 1998)
To date, I have shared my data with academics at forty-two different universities and researchers at two different policy think tanks. Everyone who tried was able to replicate my findings, and only three papers using the data have been critical of my general approach. 106 A more recent fourth piece might be viewed as mildly critical. Yet the vast majority of researchers concur that concealed handguns deter crime, and perhaps just as important, not even the critics claim to have found that they cost lives or increase crime. In the above quote, Hemenway is referring to only three studies that have examined the data. The other three pieces (to arrive at his total of six) basically merely cite these three critical papers.
Some authors—such as William Bartley and Mark Cohen or Carlisle Moody—use the original data and claim to have "found strong support for the hypothesis that the right-to-carry laws are associated with a decrease in the trend in violent crimes" or that their alternative specifications "confirm and reinforce the basic findings." 107 David Olson and Michael Maltz check the findings by using newly available county-level data from the Supplementary Homicide Report data in place of the FBI's Uniform Crime Report and obtain virtually the same drop in murders after the passage of the right-to-carry laws. 108 Others—including Florenz Plassmann and Nicolaus Tideman—contend that the reduction in murder rates is almost twice as large as I claimed. They conclude that their results "indicate that more guns generally lead to fewer rather than more murders, and that it would be wrong to dismiss right-to-carry laws on the ground that more guns mean more danger, without considering their discouraging effect on potential murders." m
Another paper by Florenz Plassman and Nicolaus Tideman examines the deterrent effects of right-to-carry laws both across states and over time. They find that all the states that adopted the laws between 1977 and 1992 experienced reductions in murder, rape, and robbery between the year the law was passed and the first, second and third full years that the law was in effect. 110 Other recent evidence by David Mustard suggests that right-to-carry laws help reduce the rate at which police are murdered.
The book reviews in economic journals have been favorable. 111 As one academic review claimed, "his empirical analysis sets a standard that will
be difficult to match this has got to be the most extensive empirical
study of crime deterrence that has been done to date.. .. The results are extremely robust, but they are also consistent with the theoretical principles." 112 Other academics from Northwestern University, the University of Texas, George Washington University, George Mason University, and Cardozo School of Law have also written supportive reviews. 113
Yet, to me, the most remarkable thing about this debate is what goes unsaid. None of my academic critics has mentioned anything about the other gun-control laws that I have examined. Not a single academic has challenged my findings that the Brady law or state waiting periods or background checks caused some crime rates to increase. In fact, they have all avoided including these laws in their own research. Nonetheless, gun-control organizations, such as Handgun Control, to this day still attack me for supposedly not accounting for other gun-control laws in my research.
Conclusion
The noise came suddenly from behind early Tuesday— feet rapidly pounding the pavement, voices cursing. Before Jim Shaver could turn around, he was knocked to the ground at East 13th Avenue and Mill Street, fighting off punches from two young men. Police said the assailants figured they'd found a drug dealer to rob, someone who'd have both drugs and money. They couldn't have been more wrong. Their victim was a 49-year-old nurse on his way to work—a nurse with a concealed weapons permit. The fists kept flying, even as Shaver told them— twice, he said—that he had a gun. Fearing for his life, Shaver pulled a .22-caliber revolver out of his coat pocket and fired several shots. One of them hit 19-year-old Damien Alexander Long in the right hip. Long's alleged accomplice, Brandon Heath Durrett, 20, wasn't injured. The pair ran off. 114
A man who police said kidnapped a 2-year-old child and robbed a disabled elderly woman of a medical monitor was in jail Friday after he was captured and held at gun point by a man with a license to carry a concealed handgun. ... "I have never pulled a gun on anyone before, and I wouldn't have pulled a gun on this man if he had not run off with that little girl," [the man who stopped the crime] said. "That mother was screaming for her child. She was quite upset." 115
Awe-struck Phoenix police declared Mr. Vertigan a hero and gave him $500 and a new pistol for catching a cop killer after running out of ammunition in a gunfight with three heavily armed men. Mr. Vertigan ... came upon three armed Mexican drug-traffickers fatally ambushing a uniformed Phoenix policeman who was patrolling alone in Phoenix's tough Maryvale precinct. Firing 14 shots with his left hand during a slam-and-bump car chase that left the killers' license number imprinted on the front of his own car, Mr. Vertigan emptied his Glock 31 .357 Sig. He wounded the shooter, who was firing at him, and forced the getaway car to crash, slowing the shooter's partners long enough for pursuing police to seize them, as well as a pound of cocaine "eight balls" they were dealing from their white Lincoln. "I always felt that if my life was in danger or anyone around me was in immediate danger I never would hesitate to use that gun. Unfortunately, that day came," Mr. Vertigan said. 116
A man who tried to commit an armed robbery at a Ben-salem convenience store Friday morning was thwarted by a customer who pulled out his own gun and fired five
shots at the crook Fearing he would be killed, police
said, the customer began shooting at the suspect.... Police said the clerks were "a little shaken up" after the attempted robbery—but they guessed that the would-be robber was probably just as shocked. "I'll bet he never expected that to happen," said Fred Harran, Bensalem's deputy director of public safety. 117
All these recent cases involved individuals with permitted concealed handguns. During 1999 concealed permit holders have prevented bank robberies, stopped what could have been a bloody attack by gang members at a teenage girl's high school graduation party, and stopped carjackings. 118 In the couple of months during which I was updating this book, armed citizens have helped capture murderers who had escaped prison, stopped hostage taking at a business which otherwise surely would have resulted in multiple deaths, and prevented robberies and rapes. 119 Residential attacks that were stopped by citizens with guns during 1999 were extremely common. 120
One of the bigger puzzles to me has been the news coverage on guns. Admittedly, some of it is easy to explain. Suppose a media outlet has two stories to choose from: one in which there is a dead body on the ground and it is a sympathetic person like a victim, another in which a women brandishes a gun and the attacker runs away, no shots are fired, no dead bodies are on the ground, and no crime is actually consummated. It
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seems pretty obvious which story is going to get the news coverage. Yet if we really want to answer the question of which policies will save lives, we must take into consideration not only the newsworthy bad events but also the bad events that never happen because people are able to defend themselves. Unfortunately, the newsworthy bad events give people a warped impression of the costs and benefits from having guns around.
Even when defensive gun uses are mentioned in the press, those mentions do not focus on typical defensive gun uses. The news stories focus primarily on the extremely rare cases in which the attacker is killed, though a few times press stories do mention cases of a gun being used to seriously wound an attacker. News coverage of defensive gun uses in which a would-be victim simply brandished a gun are essentially unheard-of. I don't think one has to rely on a conspiracy explanation to understand why this type of news coverage occurs, for it is not that surprising that dead attackers are considered more newsworthy than prevented attacks in which nobody was harmed. Even so, it is still important to recognize how this coverage can color people's perspective on how guns are used defensively. Since most people probably are very reti
cent to take a life, if they believe that defensive gun use almost always results in the death of an attacker, they will become more uncomfortable with guns.
While these examples are easily understood, some other news coverage is not as obvious. Take the case of accidental gun deaths involving young children, which we discussed in chapter 1. My guess is that people believe these events to be much more frequent than they actually are. When I have given talks, I have sometimes asked the audience how many children under age five or ten die from accidental gun shots each year; the answers are frequently in the thousand-plus range. A few answers might mention only hundreds of deaths per year. No one comes close to the Centers for Disease Control numbers: seventeen accidental gun deaths for children under age five and forty-two for children under ten in 1996. The information that forty children under age five drown each year in five-gallon water buckets or that eighty drown in bathtubs always astounds the audience. People remember national news reports of young children dying from accidental handgun shots in the home. In contrast, when was the last time that you heard on the national news of a child drowning in a five-gallon water bucket? 121
As a father of four boys, I can't imagine what life would be like if one of my sons died for any reason, including guns. But why so much more attention is given to guns when so many other risks pose a greater threat to our children is not immediately obvious to me. Indeed, it is difficult to think of anything other than guns that is as prevalent around American