More Guns Less Crime

by John R. Lott Jr

  77. Erika Schwarz (the first runner-up in the 1997 Miss America Pageant) decided to obtain a gun after a gunman stole her car when she pulled into her driveway. "It's about time they allow citizens to protect themselves. I don't advocate taking the law in your

  NOTES TO PAGES 15-17/271

  own hand. But in a situation where you're cooped up in a car or house and somebody wants to harm you, this is a good law" (Guy Coates, "Beauty Gets Ready to Shoot Car-jackers," Chattanooga Free Press, Aug. 14, 1997, p. B7). Similar stories are told by others who were motivated to obtain firearms training. A recent Wall Street Journal story discussed the reasons given by fourteen people who enrolled in a self-defense class run by Smith & Wesson: "The budget analyst had a knife held to her throat in a crowded Manhattan bar. Ms. Denman awoke 18 months ago in her rural home to find a masked, armed burglar at the foot of her bed. He'd kicked in her deadbolted door, and shot at her several times before fleeing. She dialed 911, and then waited 45 minutes for help to arrive." See Caitlin Kelly, "Gun Control," Wall Street Journal, Sept. 12, 1997, p. A20.

  78. "Georgia Lawmakers Quietly Vote Themselves the Right to Carry Weapons," Associated Press, dateline Atlanta, Mar. 19, 1996, 11:09 p.m. EST.

  79. According to Larry Mason of the Association of California Deputy District Attorneys, "The association is ... glad prosecutors have been permitted to protect themselves and that they can continue to do so for their own peace of mind and well-being" (quoted in Greg Krikorian, "Lungren Rules Prosecutors Can Carry Guns to Offices," Los Angeles Times, July 25, 1997, p. Bl).

  The Fraternal Order of Police has also strongly supported legislation that would allow current or retired police officers to carry concealed handguns with them wherever they travel within the United States. (Prepared testimony of Bernard H. Teodorski, National Vice President, Fraternal Order of Police, before the House Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime (Federal News Service, July 22, 1997.)

  80. Los Angeles Times, Jan. 4, 1996, p. El; Louis Graham, "Officials, Celebs Become Gun-Toting Sheriffs Deputies in Long Tradition," Memphis Commercial Appeal, Oct. 3, 1994, pp. 1 A, B7; and Clayton B. Cramer and David B. Kopel, "'Shall Issue': New Wave of Concealed-Handgun Permit Laws" (Independence Institute: Golden Colorado, Oct. 17, 1994).

  81. See note 77 above.

  82. See Adriel Bettelheim, "Campbell Gunning for Concealed-Weapon Proposal," Denver Post, June 8, 1997, p. A31.

  83. Gary Marx and Janan Hanna, "Boy Called Unfit for Murder Trial," Chicago Tribune, Jan. 18, 1995, p. 3; and Joan Beck, "The Murder of Children," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Oct. 24,

  1994, p. B19.

  84. Maggi Martin, "Symphony of Life Ended Too Quickly for Musician: Grieving Friends Say Man Stabbed in Lakewood Had Much to Give," Cleveland Plain Dealer, July 12,

  1995, p. 1A.

  85. John Stevenson, "Jurors Begin Deliberating Stroud's Fate," Durham (North Carolina) Herald-Sun, Feb. 9, 1995, p. CI.

  86. In 1992, only three states did not allow insanity as a defense (Idaho, Montana, and Utah), but even in these states, insanity can be used in determining whether a person had intent.

  87. See Dan Kahan and Martha Nussbaum, "Two Conceptions of Emotion in Criminal Law," Columbia Law Review 9(5 (Mar. 1996): 269-374.

  88. Model Penal Code § 2100.3(l)(b) (1980).

  89. See Kahan and Nussbaum, "Emotion in Criminal Law," Columbia Law Review: 315—17.

  90. Bullock v United States, 122 F2d 214 (DC Cir 1941).

  91. Kahan and Nussbaum, "Emotion in Criminal Law," Columbia Law Review: 325.

  92. Anne Lamoy, "Murder Rate in KCK Lowest Since 1991," Kansas City Star, Jan. 1, 1997, p. CI.

  93. John H. Kagel, Raymond C. Battalio, Howard Rachlin, and Leonard Green, "Demand Curves for Animal Consumers," Quarterly Journal of Economics 96 (Feb. 1981): 1—16; John H. Kagel, Raymond C. Battalio, Howard Rachlin, and Leonard Green, "Experimental Studies of Consumer Demand Behavior Using Laboratory Animals," Economic Inquiry 13

  272 / NOTES TO PAGES 18-22

  (Jan. 1975): 22^-38; Raymond C. Battalio, John H. Kagel, and Owen R. Phillips, "Optimal Prices and Animal Consumers in Congested Markets," Economic Inquiry 24 (Apr. 1986): 181-93; Todd Sandler, "Optimal Prices and Animal Consumers in Congested Markets: A Comment," Economic Inquiry 25 (Oct. 1987): 715-20; Raymond C. Battalio, John H. Kagel, and Owen R. Phillips, "Optimal Prices and Animal Consumers in Congested Markets: A Reply," Economic Inquiry 25 (Oct. 1987): 721-22; and Raymond C. Battalio, John H. Kagel, Howard Rachlin, and Leonard Green, "Commodity Choice Behavior with Pigeons as Subjects," Journal of Political Economy 84 (Feb. 1981): 116-51.

  94. William M. Landes, "An Economic Study of U.S. Aircraft Hijacking, 1961-1976," Journal of Law and Economics 21 (Apr. 1978): 1—29.

  95. Alfred Blumstein and Daniel Nagin, "The Deterrent Effect of Legal Sanctions on Draft Evasion," Stanford University Law Review 28 (1977): 241—76.

  96. For a particularly well-done piece that uses data from another country, see Kenneth Wolpin, "An Economic Analysis of Crime and Punishment in England and Wales, 1894-1967," Journal of Political Economy 86 (1978): 815-40. For a recent survey of papers in this area, see Isaac Ehrlich, "Crime, Punishment, and the Market for Offenses," Journal of Economic Perspectives 10 (Winter 1996): 43-67.

  97. Alfred Blumstein, Jacqueline Cohen, and Daniel Nagin, eds., Deterrence and Incapacitation: Estimating the Effects of Criminal Sanctions on Crime Rates (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1978), pp. 4, 7. Economists have responded to this report; see Isaac Ehrlich and Randall Mark, "Fear of Deterrence: A Critical Evaluation of the 'Report of the Panel on Research on Deterrent and Incapacitation Effects,'" Journal of Legal Studies 6 (June 1977): 293-316.

  98. Wallace P. Mullin, "Will Gun Buyback Programs Increase the Quantity of Guns?" Michigan State University working paper (Mar. 1997), and Martha R. Plotkin, ed., Under Fire: Gun Buy-Backs, Exchanges, and Amnesty Programs (Washington, DC: Police Executive Research Forum, 1996).

  CHAPTER TWO

  1. The Supreme Court Justices would not uphold broad protections for gun ownership "if they thought blood would flow in the streets." This point was made by Professor Daniel Polsby in a talk given at the University of Chicago, February 20,1997. As he points out, the Supreme Court would not have allowed the publication of the Pentagon Papers, despite the arguments about the freedom of the press, if it had posed a severe military risk to the United States. It is not the role of this book to debate the purpose of the Second Amendment. However, the argument that the Second Amendment implies broad protection of gun ownership seems quite strong. William Van Alstyne argues that the reference to a "well-regulated Militia" refers to the "ordinary citizen" and that it was emphatically not an allusion to "regular armed soldiers." It was ordinary citizens who were to bring their own arms to form an army when the Republic was in danger. The amendment was viewed as the ultimate limit on a government's turning against the will of the people. See William Van Alstyne, "The Second Amendment Right to Arms," Duke Law Review 43 (Apr. 1994): 1236-55.

  2. The opposite of endogenous is exogenous. An exogenous change in something is an independent change, not a response to something else. In reality, almost everything is to some extent related to something else, so the distinction between exogenous and endogenous is a matter of degree. Since models and statistical methods must put a limit on how much to include, some variables will always be treated as "exogenously given" rather than dependent on other variables. For the social sciences, this is a constant headache. Virtually any study is open to the criticism that "if variable X depends upon variable

  NOTES TO PAGES 23-26/273

  Y, your results are not necessarily valid." In general, larger studies that rely on more data have better chances of reliably incorporating more relationships. Part of the process of doing research is determining which relationships may raise important concerns for readers and then attempting to test for those concerns.

  3. With purely cross-sectional data, if one r
ecognizes that differences may exist in crime rates even after all the demographic and criminal-punishment variables are accounted for, there are simply not enough observations to take these regional differences into account. One cannot control for more variables than one has observations to explain.

  The problem with time-series data is the same. Time-series studies typically assume that crime follows a particular type of time trend (for example, they may simply assume that crime rises at a constant rate over time, or they may assume more complicated growth rates involving squared or cubic relationships). Yet almost any crime pattern over time is possible, and, as with cross-sectional data, unexplained differences over time will persist even after all the demographic and criminal-punishment variables are accounted for. Ideally, one could allow each year to have a different effect, but with time-series data we would again find that we had more variables with which to explain changes than we had observations to explain.

  4. Gary Kleck and E. Britt Patterson, "The Impact of Gun Control and Gun-Ownership Levels on Violence Rates," Journal ofQuantitative Criminology 9 (1993): 249—87.

  5. David McDowall, Colin Loftin, and Brian Wiersema, "Easing Concealed Firearm Laws: Effects on Homicide in Three States," Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 86 (Fall 1995): 193-206.

  6. Arthur L. Kellermann, et al., "Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home," New England Journal ofMedicine (Oct. 7, 1993): 1084-91.

  7. Ibid., p. 1084.

  8. The interesting letter that provoked this response from Kellermann et al. was written by students in a graduate statistics class at St. Louis University. See the New England Journal of Medicine (Feb. 3, 1994): 366, 368.

  9. Recent attempts to relate the crime rate to the prison population concern me. Besides difficulties in relating the total prison population to any particular type of crime, I think it is problematic to compare a stock (the prison population) with a flow (the crime rate). See, for example, Steven Levitt, "The Effect of Prison Population Size on Crime Rates: Evidence from Prison Overcrowding Litigation," Quarterly Journal of Economics 111 (1996): 144-67.

  10. Gary S. Becker, "Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach," Journal of Political Economy 76 (Mar./Apr. 1968): 169—217. See also, for example, Isaac Ehrlich, "Participation in Illegitimate Activities: A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation," Journal of Political Economy 81 (1973): 521-65; Michael K. Block and John Heineke, "A Labor Theoretical Analysis of Criminal Choice," American Economic Review 65 (June 1975): 314—25; William M. Landes, "An Economic Study of U.S. Aircraft Hijacking, 1961—1976," Journal of Law and Economics 21 (Apr. 1978): 1—29.; John R. Lott, Jr., "Juvenile Delinquency and Education: A Comparison of Public and Private Provision," International Review of Law and Economics 1 (Dec. 1987): 163—75; James Andreoni, "Criminal Deterrence in the Reduce Form: A New Perspective on Ehr-lich's Seminal Study," Economic Inquiry 33 (July 1995): 476—83; Morgan O. Reynolds, "Crime and Punishment in America," (Dallas: National Center for Policy Analysis, June 1995); and Levitt, "Effect of Prison Population Size on Crime Rates."

  11. John R. Lott, Jr., "Do We Punish High-Income Criminals Too Heavily?" Economic Inquiry 30 (Oct. 1992): 583-608.

  12. John R. Lott, Jr., "The Effect of Conviction on the Legitimate Income of Criminals," Economics Letters 34 (Dec. 1990): 381-85 ; John R. Lott, Jr., "An Attempt at Measuring the Total Monetary Penalty from Drug Convictions: The Importance of an Individual's Reputation," Journal of Legal Studies 21 (Jan. 1992): 159-87.

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  13. This approach is also known as controlling for "fixed effects," where a separate dummy variable is used to account for each county.

  14. James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, "Making Neighborhoods Safe," Atlantic Monthly, Feb. 1989, and "Broken Windows," Atlantic Monthly, Mar. 1982.

  15. Arson was excluded because of a large number of inconsistencies in the data and the small number of counties reporting this measure.

  16. Robbery includes street robbery, commercial robbery, service station robbery, convenience store robbery, residence robbery, and bank robbery. (See also the discussion of burglary regarding why the inclusion of residence robbery creates difficulty with this broad measure.) After I wrote the original paper, two different commentators attempted to argue that "If 'shall-issue' [a synonym for "nondiscretionary"] concealed-carrying laws really deter criminals from undertaking street crimes, then it is only reasonable to expect the laws to have an impact on robberies. Robbery takes place between strangers on the street. A high percentage of homicide and rape, on the other hand, occurs inside a home—where concealed-weapons laws should have no impact. These findings strongly suggest that something else—not new concealed-carry laws—is responsible for the reduction in crime observed by the authors." See, for example, Doug Weil, "Response to John Lott's Study on the Impact of'Carry-Concealed' Laws on Crime Rates," U.S. Newswire, Aug. 8,1996. The curious aspect of the emphasis on robbery over other crimes like murder and rape is that if robbery is the most obvious crime to be affected by gun-control laws, why have virtually no gun-control studies examined robberies? In fact, Kleck's literature survey only notes one previous gun-control study that examined the issue of robberies ("Guns and Violence: An Interpretive Review of the Field," Social Pathology 1 [Jan. 1995]: 12—47). More important, given that the FBI includes many categories of robberies besides those that "take place between strangers on the street," it is not obvious why this category should exhibit the greatest sensitivity to concealed-handgun laws.

  17. "NRA poll: Salespeople No. 1 for Permit Applications," Dallas Morning News, Apr. 19, 1996, p. 32A.

  18. For example, see Arnold S. Linsky, Murray A. Strauss, and Ronet Bachman-Prehn, "Social Stress, Legitimate Violence, and Gun Availability," Paper presented at the annual meetings of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, 1988; and Clayton E. Cramer and David B. Kopel, "'Shall Issue': The New Wave of Concealed-Handgun Permit Laws," Tennessee Law Review 62 (Spring 1995): 680-91.

  19. Among those who made this comment to David Mustard and me were Bob Bar-nhart, Manager of the Intelligence/Concealed Handgun United of Multnomah County, Oregon; Mike Woodward, of the Oregon Law Enforcement Data System; Joe Vincent of the Washington Department of Licensing Firearms Unit; Alan Krug, who provided us with the Pennsylvania Permit data; and Susan Harrell of the Florida Department of State Concealed Weapons Division. Evidence for this point with respect to Virginia was obtained from Eric Lipton, "Virginians Get Ready to Conceal Arms: State's New Weapon Law Brings a Flood of Inquiries," Washington Post, June 28, 1995, p. Al, who notes that "analysts say the new law, which drops the requirement that prospective gun carriers show a 'demonstrated need' to be armed, likely won't make much of a difference in rural areas, where judges have long issued permits to most people who applied for them. But in urban areas such as Northern Virginia—where judges granted few permits because few residents could justify a need for them—the number of concealed weapon permits issued is expected to soar. In Fairfax, for example, a county of more than 850,000 people, only 10 now have permits." See also Cramer and Kopel, "New Wave of Concealed-Handgun Permit Laws," pp. 679—758.

  20. For example, see Kleck and Patterson, "Impact of Gun Control and Gun-Ownership Levels on Violence Rates."

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  white females in the 20-29 age range by 19 percent, while the difference for the United States as a whole is 3 percent. The same ratio for the 30—39 age range is 12 percent in Alaska and 1 percent nationally. Yet the greatest differences occur for blacks. In Alaska black males outnumber black females in the 20-29 age range by 40 percent, while in the rest of the United States the reverse is true, with black females outnumbering (nonincar-cerated) black males by 7 percent.

  22. While no reliable data are available on this question, a couple of polls indicate that the number of otherwise law-abiding citizens who carry concealed handguns may be substantial. The results of a recent Oklahoma poll showed that up to 6 percent o
f Oklahoma residents already carry concealed handguns either on their persons or in their cars; see Michael Smith, "Many Permits to Go to Lawbreakers," Tulsa World, May 5, 1996, p. A15. The margin of error in the poll was 3.5 percent, which is substantial, given the small value with which this error is compared.

  23. Sam Peltzman, "The Effects of Automobile Safety Regulation," Journal of Political Economy 83 (Aug. 1975): 677-725.

  24. Steven Peterson, George Hoffer, and Edward Millner, "Are Drivers of Air-Bag-Equipped Cars More Aggressive? A Test of the Offsetting-Behavior Hypothesis," Journal of Law and Economics 38 (Oct. 1995): 251-64.

  25. Kieran Murray, "NRA Taps into Anger of Mid-American Gunlovers," Reuters Newsw-ire, dateline Dallas, Apr. 21, 1996.

  26. At least since the work of Isaac Ehrlich, economists have also realized that potential biases exist from using the offense rate as both the variable that one is seeking to explain and as the denominator in determining the arrest rate. To see this, suppose that mistakes are made in measuring the crime rate (and mistakes are certainly made) because of recording inaccuracies or simply because citizens may change the rates at which they report crime over time. Accidentally recording a crime rate that is too high will result in our recording an arrest rate that is too low, since the arrest rate is the total number of arrests divided by the total number of crimes. The converse is also true: When too low a crime rate is recorded, the arrest rate that we observe will be too high. Obviously, this problem will make it appear that a negative relationship exists between arrest rates and crime even if no relationship exists. There is also the concern that increasing crime rates may lower arrest rates if the same resources are being asked to do more work. See Isaac Ehrlich, "Participation in Illegitimate Activities: A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation ," Journal of Political Economy 81 (1973): 548-53.

  CHAPTER THREE