More Guns Less Crime (12 page)

Violent- Murder Rape Aggravated- Robbery

crime rate rate

rate assault rate rate

A. Violent-crime categories

I I 1 /2 Mean population

that is black (4.3)

£a Mean population that is black (8.63)

I Mean population that is black plus one standard deviation (23)

3 Mean population that is black plus two standard deviations (37.4)

Property- Auto-theft Burglary Larceny

crime rate

rate

rate

rate

B. Property-crime categories

l_J 1/2 Mean population that is black (4.3)

fc£j Mean population that is black (8.63)

I Mean population that is black plus one standard deviation (23)

I Mean population that is black plus two standard deviations (37.4)

Figure 4.4. How does the change in crime from nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws vary with the percent of a county's population that is black?

d"8 /CHAPTER FOUR

With the extremely high rates of murder and other crimes committed against blacks, it is understandable why so many blacks are concerned about gun control. University of Florida criminologist Gary Kleck says, "Blacks are more likely to have been victims of crime or to live in neighborhoods where there's a lot of crime involving guns. So, generally, blacks are more pro-control than whites are." Nationally, polls indicate that 83 percent of blacks support police permits for all gun purchases. 26 While many blacks want to make guns harder to get, the irony is that blacks benefit more than other groups from concealed-handgun laws. Allowing potential victims a means for self-defense is more important in crime-prone neighborhoods. Even more strikingly, the history of gun control in the United States has often been a series of attempts to disarm blacks. 27 In explaining the urgency of adopting the U.S. Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment, Duke University Law Professor William Van Alstyne writes,

It was, after all, the defenselessness of the Negroes (denied legal rights to keep and bear arms by state law) from attack by night riders—even to protect their own lives, their own families, and their own homes—that made it imperative that they, as citizens, could no longer be kept defenseless by a regime of state law denying them the common right to keep and bear arms. 28

Indeed, even in the 1960s much of the increased regulation of firearms stemmed from the fear generated by Black Panthers who openly carried guns.

Alexis Herman, the current Secretary of Labor, experienced firsthand the physical risks of growing up black in Alabama. Describing her difficult confirmation hearings, an Associated Press story included the following story:

Anyone who thought the frustrations of waiting for confirmation would discourage her knew nothing about the lessons Herman learned from her father. They forgot that he sued to integrate the Democratic Party in Alabama, and later became the state's first black ward leader. They never heard about the night he put a pistol in his young daughter's hands and stepped out of the car to confront the Ku Klux Klan.

"He taught me that you have to face adversity. He taught me to stand by my principles," Herman said in the interview. "He also taught me how to work within the system for change."

Herman said her father never raised his voice, but he always kept a small silver pistol under the driver's seat of his DeSoto as he drove from community meeting to community meeting around Mobile. She always sat close by his side, unless the pistol was out. "The only way that I ever

CONCEALED-HANDGUN LAWS AND CRIME RATES/69

knew trouble was around was that the gun would come out from under the driver's seat and he'd put it by his side," she said.

As they left the home of a minister one Christmas Eve, the pistol was on the car seat. She was 5. "It was a dark road, a dirt road to get back to the main highway," she recalled. "We were driven off the road by another car, and they were Klansmen."

She hid on the floor and her father pressed the pistol's white handle into her palm. "He told me, 'If anybody opens this door, I want you to pull this trigger.'" He locked the door behind him and walked ahead to keep them away from the car. She crouched in the dark, listening until the shouts and scuffling died down.

Eventually, the minister came to the car to drive Herman home. Her father, who had been beaten, rode in another car. 29

Recently, after testifying before the Illinois state House of Representatives on whether to pass a concealed-handgun bill, I was approached by a black representative from Chicago who supported the bill. 30 He told me that, at least for Illinois, he was not surprised by my finding that areas with large minority populations gained the most from these laws. Noting the high rate at which young, black males are stopped by police and the fact that it is currently a felony to possess a concealed handgun, he said that an honest, law-abiding, young, black male would be "nuts" to carry a concealed handgun in Illinois. He mentioned a case that had occurred just a week earlier: * Alonzo Spellman—a black professional football player for the Chicago Bears—had been arrested in Chicago after a routine traffic violation revealed that he had a handgun in his car. 31 Noting the inability of the police to protect people in heavily black areas when "bad guys" already had illegal guns, the representative said he believed that the current power imbalance between law-abiding people and criminals was greatest in black areas.

Perhaps it is not too surprising that blacks and those living in urban areas gain the most from being able to defend themselves with concealed handguns, since the absence of police appears most acute in black, central-city neighborhoods. Until 1983, the American Housing Survey annually asked sixty thousand households whether their neighborhoods had adequate police protection. Black, central-city residents were about twice as likely as whites generally to report that they did not have adequate protection, and six times more likely to say that they had considered moving because of an insufficient police presence in their neighborhoods. 32

These results should at least give pause to the recent rush in California to pass city ordinances and state laws banning low-cost, "Saturday night

70/CHAPTER FOUR

specials." Indeed, the results have implications for many gun-control rules that raise gun prices. Law-abiding minorities in the most crime-prone areas produced the greatest crime reductions from being able to defend themselves. Unfortunately, however unintentionally, California's new laws risk disarming precisely these poor minorities.

Using Other Crime Rates to Explain the Changes in the Crime Rates Being Studied

Other questions still exist regarding the specifications employed here. Admittedly, although arrest rates and average differences in individual counties are controlled for, more can be done to account for the changing environments that determine the level of crime. One method is to use changes in other crime rates to help us understand why the crime rates that we are studying are changing over time. Table 4.5 reruns the specifications used to generate figure 4.1 A but includes either the burglary or robbery rates as proxies for other changes in the criminal justice system. Robbery and burglary are the violent- and property-crime categories that are the least related to changes in concealed-handgun laws, but they still tend to move up and down together with all the other types of crimes. 33

Some evidence that burglary or robbery rates will measure other changes in the criminal justice system or other omitted factors that explain changing crime rates can be seen in their correlations with other crime categories. Indeed, the robbery and burglary rates are very highly correlated with the other crime rates. 34 The two sets of specifications reported in table 4.5 closely bound the earlier estimates, and the estimates continue to imply that the introduction of concealed-handgun laws coincided with similarly large drops in violent crimes and increases in property crimes. These results differ from the preceding results in that the nondiscretionary laws are not significant related to robberies. The estimates on the other control variables also remain essentially unchanged. 35

Crime: Changes in Levels Versus Changes in Trends

The preceding results in this chapter examined whether the average crime rate fell after the nondiscretionary laws went into effect. If changes in the law affect behavior with a lag, changes in the trend are probably more relevant; therefore, a more important question is, How has the crime trend changed with the change in laws? Examining whether there is a change in levels or a change in whether the crime rate is rising or falling could yield very different results. For example, if the crime rate

Table 4.5 Using crime rates that are relatively unrelated to changes in nondiscretionary laws as a method of controlling for other changes in the legal environment: controlling for robbery and burglary rates

Table 4.5 Continued

Percent change in various crime rates for changes in explanatory variables

Violent Aggravated

crime Murder Rape assault

Change in the explanatory variable

Robbery

Property crime

Burglary Larceny

Auto theft

Controlling for burglary rates

Nondiscretionary law adopted multiplied by *county population (evaluated at mean county population)

Arrest rate for the crime category increased by 100 percentage points

-2.4%* 1%

-0.026* 5%

-4.3%* 1.1%

-0.13* 6%

-2.0%* 0.4%

-0.05*

3%

-2.6%* 0.4%

-0.05* 5%

0.4% 0.04%

-0.043* 3%

1.8%* 0.7%

-0.05* 6%

1.4%* 0.4%

-0.01* 2%

3.6%* 0.5%

-0.01* 2%

Note: While not all the coefficient estimates are reported, all the control variables are the same as those used in table 4.1, including year and county dummies. All regressions use weighted least squares, where the weighting is each county's population. Net violent and property-crime rates are respectively net of robbery and burglary rates to avoid producing any artificial collinearity. Likewise, the arrest rates for those values omit the portion of the corresponding arrest rates due to arrests for robbery and burglary. While not reported, the coefficients for the robbery and burglary rates were extremely statistically significant and positive. Entire sample used over the 1977 to 1992 period. *The result is statistically significant at the 1 percent level for a two-tailed t-test.

CONCEALED-HANDGUN LAWS AND CRIME RATES/73

was rising right up until the law was adopted but falling thereafter, some values that appeared while crime rate was rising could equal some that appeared as it was falling. In other words, deceptively similar levels can represent dramatically different trends over time.

I used several methods to examine changes in the trends exhibited over time in crime rates. First, I reestimated the regressions in table 4.1, using year-to-year changes on all explanatory variables (see table 4.6). These regressions were run using both a variable that equals 1 when a nondiscretionary law is in effect as well as the change in that variable (called "differencing" the variable) to see if the initial passage of the law had an impact. The results consistently indicate that the law lowered the rates of violent crime, rape, and aggravated assault. Nondiscretionary laws discourage murder in both specifications, but the effect is only statistically significant when the nondiscretionary variable is also differenced. The property-crime results are in line with those of earlier tables, showing that nondiscretionary laws produce increases in property crime. Violent crimes decreased by an average of about 2 percent annually, whereas property crimes increased by an average of about 5 percent.

As one might expect, the nondiscretionary laws affected crime immediately, with an additional change spread out over time^Why would the entire effect not be immediate? An obvious explanation is that not everyone who would eventually obtain a permit to carry a concealed handgun did so right away. For instance, as shown by the data in table 4.7, the number of permits granted in Florida, Oregon, and Pennsylvania was still increasing substantially long after the nondiscretionary law was put into effect. Florida's law was passed in 1987, Oregon's in 1990, and Pennsylvania's in 1989.

Reestimating the regression results from table 4.1 to account for different time trends in the crime rates before and after the passage of the law provides consistent strong evidence that the deterrent impact of concealed handguns increases with time. For most violent crimes, the time trend prior to the passage of the law indicates that crime was rising. The results using the simple time trends for these violent-crime categories are reported in table 4.8. Figures 4.5 through 4.9 illustrate how the violent-crime rate varies before and after the implementation of nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws when both the linear and squared time trends are employed. Comparing the slopes of the crime trends before and after the enactment of the laws shows that the trends become more negative to a degree that is statistically significant after the laws were passed. 36

These results answer another possible objection: whether the findings are simply a result of so-called crime cycles. Crime rates rise or fall over

Table 4.6 Results of rerunning the regressions on differences

Endogenous variables in terms of first differences of the natural logarithm of the crime rate

Exogenous variables

Aln(violent- Aln(Murder Aln(Rape Aln(Aggravated-crime rate) rate) rate) assault rate)

Aln(robbery Aln(property- Aln(Burglary Aln(Larceny Aln(Auto-rate) crime rate) rate) rate) theft rate)

All variables except for the nondiscretionary dummy differenced

Nondiscretionary law adopted

First differences in the arrest rate for the crime category

First differences in the dummy for nondiscretionary law adopted

First differences in the arrest rate for the crime category

-22%*

-0.05%*

-2.6%

-0.15%*

-5.2%* -4.6%*

-0.09%*

-0.09%*

-3.3%*

-0.06%*

5.2%*

-0.0

3.5%*

-0.24%*

All variables differenced

-2.7%*

-0.05%*

-3.6%*

-0.15%*

-3.9%*

-5.4%*

-0.09%* -0.09%*

-0.7%

-0.06%*

-0.0

0.7%

-.24%*

5.2%*

-0.02%*

6.2%*

-0.02%*

12.8%*

-0.02%*

24.2%*

-0.02%*

Note: The variables for income; population; race, sex, and age of the population; and density are all in terms of first differences. While not all the coefficient estimates are reported, all the control

variables used in Table 4.1 are used here, including year and county dummies. All regressions use weighted least squares, where the weighting is each county's population. Entire sample used over

the 1977 to 1992 period.

*The result is statistically significant at the 1 percent level for a two-tailed t-test.

***The result is statistically significant at the 10 percent level for a two-tailed t-test.

****The result is statistically significant at the 11 percent level for a two-tailed t-test.

CONCEALED-HANDGUN LAWS AND CRIME RATES/75

Table 4.7 Permits granted by state: Florida, Oregon, and Pennsylvania

"Estimate of the number of concealed-handgun permits issued immediately before Florida's law

went into effect from David McDowall, Colin Loftin, and Brian Wiersema, "Easing Concealed

Firearms Laws: Effects on Homicide in Three States," Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 86 (Fall

1995): 194.

December 31, 1991.

'Number of permits issued under discretionary law.