More Guns Less Crime (20 page)

This letter, I think, clarifies the funding issue, and I would only like to add that while the faculty at the Law School chose to award me this fellowship, even they did not inquire into the specific research I planned to undertake. 12 The judgment was made solely on the quality and quantity of my past research, and while much of my work has dealt with crime, this was my first project involving gun control. No one other than myself had any idea what research I was planning to do. However, even if one somehow believed that Olin were trying to buy research, it must be getting a very poor return on its money. Given the hundreds of people at the different universities who have received the same type of fellowship, I have been the only one to work on the issue of gun control.

Unfortunately, as the quote from Ms. Rand's letter and statements by many other gun-control advocates—made long after Simon's explanation—indicates, the facts about funding did little to curtail the comments of those spreading the false rumors. 13

After these attacks on my funding, the gun-control organizations brought up new issues. For example, during the spring of 1997 the Violence Policy Center sent out a press release entitled "Who Is John Lott?" that claimed, among other things, "Lott believes that some crime is good for society, that wealthy criminals should not be punished as harshly as poor convicts." I had in fact been arguing that "individuals guilty of the same crime should face the same expected level of punishment" and that with limited resources to fight crime, it is not possible to eliminate all of it. 14 1 would have thought that most people would recognize these silly assertions for what they were, but they were picked up and republished by publications such as the New Republic. 15

The aversion to honest public debate has been demonstrated to me over and over again since my study first received attention. Recently, for example, Randy Roth, a visiting colleague at the University of Chicago Law School, asked me to appear on a radio program that he does from the University of Hawaii on a public radio station. I had almost com-

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pletely stopped doing radio interviews a few months before because they were too much of an interruption to my work, but Randy, whom I have known only very briefly from lunch-table conversation, seemed like a very interesting person, and I thought that it would be fun to do the show with him. I can only trust that he doesn't normally have as much trouble as he had this time in getting an opposing viewpoint for his program. In a note that Randy shared with me, he described a conversation that he had with Brandon Stone, of the Honolulu Police Department, whom he had been trying for a while to get to participate. Randy wrote as follows on March 3, 1997:

Brandon called to say he had not changed his mind—he will not participate in any gun-control radio show involving John Lott. Furthermore, he said he had discussed this with all the others who are active in this area (the Hawaii Firearms Coalition, I think he called it), and that they have "banded together"—none will participate in such a show.

He said he didn't want to "impugn" John's character ... [and] then he went on to talk about all the money involved in this issue, the fact that [the] Olin Corp. is in the firearm business and financing John's chair, etc. He said John's study had been given to the media before experts first could discredit it, implying that this "tactic" was used because the study could not withstand the scrutiny of objective scholars.

He said the ideas promoted by John's study are "fringe ideas" and that they are "dangerous." When I pointed out that such ideas not only have been publicly debated in other states, but that some of those states actually have enacted legislation, he basically just said that Hawaii is a special place and other states have sometimes been adversely affected by unfair tactics by the pro-gun lobby.

I kept coming back to my belief that public debate is good and that my show would give him an opportunity to point out anything about John's study that he believes to be incorrect, irrelevant, distorted, or whatever. He kept saying that public debate does more harm than good when others misuse the forum. When he specifically mentions the firearm industry ("follow the money" was his suggestion, to understand what John's study is all about), I reminded him of John's association with the University of Chicago and his outstanding reputation, both for scholarship and integrity. He then said he realized John was "my friend," as though I couldn't be expected to be objective. He also said that John was "out of his field" in this area.

My hunch is that it's going to be extremely difficult finding a studio guest with the credentials and ability to do a good job on the pro—gun-control side.

After talking with Randy and in an attempt to create a balanced program, I also telephoned Mr. Stone. While we did not get into the detail that he went into with Randy, I did try to address his concerns over my funding and my own background in criminal justice as chief economist at the U.S. Sentencing Commission during the late 1980s. Stone also expressed his concerns to me that Hawaiians would not be best served by our debating the issue and that Hawaiians had already made up their minds on this topic. I said that he seemed like an articulate person and that it would be good to have a lively discussion on the subject, but he said that the program "could only do more harm than good" and that any pro—gun-control participation would only lend "credibility" to the discussion. 16

Before I did my original study, I would never have expected it to receive the attention that it did. None of the refereed journal articles that I have produced has received so much attention. Many people have told me that it was politically naive. That may be, but this much is clear: I never would have guessed how much people fear discussion of these issues. I never would have known how much effort goes into deliberately ignoring certain findings in order to deny them news coverage. Nor would I have seen, after news coverage did occur, how much energy goes into attacking the integrity of those who present such findings, with such slight reference—or no reference at all—to the actual merits of the research. I was also surprised by the absolute confidence shown by gun-control advocates that they could garner extensive news coverage whenever they wanted.

Criticisms of the Original Study

A second line of attack came from academic, quasi-academic, and gun-control advocacy groups concerning the competence with which the study was conducted. Many of these objections were dealt with somewhere in the original study, which admittedly is very long. Yet it should have been easy enough for critics—especially academics—to check.

The attacks have been fairly harsh, especially by the standards of academic discourse. For example,

"They highlight things that support their hypothesis while they ignore things contrary to their hypothesis," said Daniel Webster, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University Center for Gun Policy and Research.

"We think the study falls far short of any reasonable standard of good social science research in making [their] case " said economist Daniel

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Nagin of Carnegie-Mellon University, who has analyzed Lott's data with colleague Dan Black. 17

I have made the data I used available to all academics who have requested them, and so far professors at twenty-four universities have taken advantage of that. Of those who have made the effort to use the extensive data set, Dan Black and Daniel Nagin have been the only ones to publicly criticize the study.

The response from some academics, particularly those at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, has been highly unusual in many ways. For instance, who has ever heard of academics mounting an attack on a scholarly study by engaging in a systematic letter-writing campaign to local newspapers around the country? 18 One letter from a citizen to the Springfield (Illinois) State Journal-Register noted, "Dear Editor: Golly, I'm impressed that the staff at Johns Hopkins University reads our local State Journal-Register. I wonder if they subscribe to it." 19

The rest of this chapter briefly reviews the critiques and then provides my responses to their concerns. I discuss a number of issues below that represent criticisms raised in a variety of published or unpublished research papers as well as in the popular press:

1 Is the scale of the effect realistic?

Large reductions in violence are quite unlikely because they would be out of proportion to the small scale of the change in carrying firearms that the legislation produced. (Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins, "Concealed-Handgun Permits: The Case of the Counterfeit Deterrent," The Responsive Community [Spring 1997]: 59, cited hereafter as Zimring and Hawkins, "Counterfeit Deterrent")

In some states, like Pennsylvania, almost 5 percent of the population has concealed-handgun permits. In others, like Florida, the portion is about

2 percent and growing quickly. The question here is whether these percentages of the population are sufficient to generate 8 percent reductions in murders or 5 percent reductions in rapes. One important point to take into account is that applicants for permits do not constitute a random sample of the population. Applicants are likely to be those most at risk. The relevant comparison is not between the percentage of the population being attacked and the percentage of the entire population holding permits, but between the percentage of the population most vulnerable to attack and the percentage of that population holding permits.

Let us consider some numbers from the sample to see how believable

these results are. The yearly murder rate for the average county is 5.65 murders per 100,000 people, that is, .00565 percent of the people in the average county are murdered each year. An 8 percent change in this murder rate amounts to a reduction of 0.0005 percent. Obviously, even if only 2 percent of the population have handgun permits, that 2 percent is a huge number relative to the 0.0005 percent reduction in the murder rate. Even the largest category of violent crimes, aggravated assault, involves 180 cases per 100,000 people in the average county per year (that is, 0.18 percent of the people are victims of this crime in the typical year). A 7 percent change in this number implies that the assault rate declines from 0.18 percent of the population to 0.167 percent of the population. Again, this 0.013 percent change in the assault rate is quite small compared to the observed changes in the number of concealed-handgun permits.

Even if those who carry concealed handguns face exactly the same risk of being attacked as everyone else, a 2 percent increase in the portion of the population carrying concealed handguns seems comparable to the percentage-point reductions in crime. Bearing in mind that those carrying guns are most likely to be at risk, the drop in crime rates correlated with the presence of these guns even begins to seem relatively small. Assuming that just 2 percent of the population carries concealed handguns, the drop in the murder rate only requires that 0.025 percent of those with concealed-handgun permits successfully ward off a life-threatening attack to achieve the 0.0005 percent reduction in the murder rate. The analogous percentage for aggravated assaults is only 0.65 percent. In other words, if less than seven-tenths of one percent of those with concealed handguns successfully ward off an assault, that would account for the observed drop in the assault rate.

2 The importance of "crime cycles"

Crime rates tend to be cyclical with somewhat predictable declines following several years of increases... . Shall-issue laws, as well as a number of other measures intended to reduce crime, tend to be enacted during periods of rising crime. Therefore, the reductions in violent crime ... attribute^] to the implementation of shall-issue laws may be due to the variety of other crime-fighting measures, or to a commonly observed downward drift in crime levels towards some long-term average. (Daniel W. Webster, "The Claims That Right-to-Carry Laws Reduce Violent Crime Are Unsubstantiated " The Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, copy obtained March 6, 1997, p. 1; cited hereafter as Webster, "Claims")

Despite claims to the contrary, the regressions do control for national and state crime trends in several different ways. At the national level, I

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use a separate variable for each year, a technique that allows me to account for the changes in average national crime rates from one year to another. Any national cycles in crime rates should be accounted for by this method. At the state level, some of the estimates use a separate time trend for each state, and the results with this method generally yielded even larger drops in violent-crime rates associated with nondiscretionary (shall-issue) laws.

To illustrate that the results are not merely due to the "normal" ups and downs for crime, we can look again at the diagrams in chapter 4 showing crime patterns before and after the adoption of the nondiscretionary laws. The declines not only begin right when the concealed-handgun laws pass, but the crime rates end up well below their levels prior to the law. Even if laws to combat crime are passed when crime is rising, why would one believe that they happened to be passed right at the peak of any crime cycle?

As to the concern that other changes in law enforcement may have been occurring at the same time, the estimates account for changes in other gun-control laws and changes in law enforcement as measured by arrest and conviction rates as well as by prison terms. No previous study of crime has attempted to control for as many different factors that might explain changes in the crime rate.

3 Did I assume that there was an immediate and constant effect from these laws and that the effect should be the same everywhere?

The "statistical models assumed: (1) an immediate and constant effect of shall-issue laws, and (2) similar effects across different states and counties." (Webster, "Claims," p. 2; see also Dan Black and Daniel Nagin, "Do 'Right-to-Carry' Laws Deter Violent Crime?" Journal of Legal Studies 27 [January 1998], p. 213.)