More Guns Less Crime (25 page)

Black and Nagin present a very misleading picture of the trade-offs involved with the solution that examined the more populous counties. 38 The relevant comparison is between weighted numbers of missing observations, not the total number of missing observations, since the regressions are weighted by county population and the missing observations tend to be from relatively small counties, which are given a smaller weight. 39 When this is done, the benefits obtained by excluding all counties with fewer than 100,000 people become much more questionable. The most extreme case is for aggravated assault, where Black and Nagin eliminate 86 percent of the sample (a 29 percent drop in the weighted frequency) in order to reduce weighted missing values from 2.8 to 1.5 percent. Even for murder, 77 percent of the sample is dropped, so that the weighted missing data declines from 11.7 to 1.9 percent. The rape and robbery categories lie between these two cases, both in terms of the number of counties with fewer than 100,000 people and in terms of the change in the amount of weighted missing data. 40

Why they choose to emphasize the cut-off that they did is neither explained nor obvious. The current cost-benefit ratio is rather lopsided. For example, eliminating counties with fewer than 20,000 people would have removed 70 percent of the missing arrest ratios for murder and lost only 20 percent of the observations (the weighted frequencies are 23 and 6 percent respectively). There is nothing wrong with seeing whether the estimates provide the same results over counties of various sizes, but if that is their true motivation for excluding portions of the data, it should be clearly stated.

Despite ignoring all these observations, it is only when they also remove the data for Florida that they weaken my results for murder and rape (though the results for aggravated assault and robbery are even larger and more statistically significant). Only eighty-six counties with more than 100,000 people adopted nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws between 1977 and 1992, and twenty of these counties are in Florida. Yet after all this exclusion of data, Black and Nagin still find no evidence that allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns increases crime, and two violent-crime categories show a statistically significant drop in crime. The difference between their approach and mine is rather stark: I did not select which observations to include; I used all the data for all the counties over the entire period for which observations were available.

22 What can we learn about the deterrent effect of concealed handguns from this study?

The regression study [that Lott and Mustard] report is an all-or-nothing proposition as far as knowledge of legal impact is concerned. If the model is wrong, if their bottom-line estimates of impact cannot withstand scrutiny, there is no intermediate knowledge of the law's effects on behavior that can help us sort out the manifold effects of such legislation. As soon as we find flaws in the major conclusions, the regression analyses tell us nothing. What we know from this study about the effects of "shall-carry" laws is, therefore, nothing at all. (Zimring and Hawkins, "Counterfeit Deterrent," p. 59)

Academics can reasonably differ about what factors account for changes in crime. Sociologists and criminologists, for example, have examined gun control without trying to control for changes in arrest or conviction rates. Others might be particularly concerned about the impact of drugs on crime. Economists such as myself try to include measures of deterrence, though I am also sympathetic to other concerns. In this book and my other research, my approach has not been to say that only one set of variables or even one specification can explain the crime rate. My attitude has been that if someone believes that a variable is important and has any plausible reason for including it, I have made an effort to include it. This book reports many different approaches and specifications—all of which support the conclusion that allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns reduces crime. I believe that no other study on crime has used as extensive a data set as was used here, and no previous study has attempted to control for as many different specifications.

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23 Summarizing the concerns about the evidence that concealed-handgun laws deter crime

The gun lobby claims to have a new weapon in its arsenal this year—a study by economist John Lott. But the Lott study shoots blanks. In reviewing Lott's research and methodology, Carnegie-Mellon University Profs. Daniel Nagin and Dan Black, and Georgetown University's Prof, fens Ludwig corrected for the many fatal flaws in Lott's original analysis and found no evidence of his claim that easing restrictions on carrying concealed handguns leads to a decrease in violent crime. Nagin, Black, and Ludwig recently concluded in a televised debate with Lott that "there is absolutely no credible evidence to support the idea that permissive concealed-carry laws reduce violent crime," and that "it would be a mistake to formulate policy based on the findings from Dr. Lott's study." (fames Brady, "Concealed Handguns; Putting More Guns on Streets Won't Make America Safer," Minneapolis Star Tribune, March 21, 1997, p. 21A)

Unlike the authors of past papers on gun control such as Arthur Kel-lermann and the authors of the 1995 University of Maryland study, I immediately made my data available to all academics who requested it. 41 To date, my data have been supplied to academics at twenty-four universities, including Harvard, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, Emory, Vanderbilt, Louisiana State, Michigan State, Florida State, the University of Texas, the University of Houston, the University of Maryland, Georgetown, and the College of William and Mary.

James Brady's op-ed piece ignores the fact that some of these academics from Vanderbilt, Emory, and Texas paid their own way to attend the December 9,1996, debate sponsored by his organization—Handgun Control. While Handgun Control insisted on rules that did not allow these academics to participate, I am sure that they would have spoken out to support the integrity of my original study.

Those who have attempted to replicate the findings in the original Journal of Legal Studies paper have been able to do so, and many have gone beyond this to provide additional support for the basic findings. For example, economists at Vanderbilt University have estimated over 10,000 regressions attempting to see whether the deterrent effects of nondiscre-tionary laws are at all sensitive to all possible combinations of the various data sets on demographics, income, population, arrest rates, and so on. Their results are quite consistent with those reported in this book. 42

I have tried in this chapter to examine the critiques leveled against my work. In many cases, the concerns they describe were addressed in the original paper. In others, I believe that relatively simple responses exist

to the complaints. However, even taking these critics at their worst, I still believe that a comment that I made at the December 9 discussion sponsored by Handgun Control still holds:

Six months ago, who would have thought that Handgun Control would be rushing out studies to argue that allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns would have no effect, or might have a delayed impact, in terms of dropping crimes? (Morning Edition, National Public Radio, 10:00 a.m. ET, December 10, 1996.

Eight

.Some Final Thoughts

As more than 30 diners sat in Sam's St. John's Seafood [in Jacksonville, Florida] about 7:20 p.m., a masked man entered the eatery and ordered everyone to the floor, said co-owner Sam Bajalia. The man grabbed waitress Amy Norton from where she and another waitress were huddled on the floor and tried to get her to open the cash register.

At that point, [Oscar] Moore stood up and shot him. Another diner ... pulled out a .22-caliber derringer and fired at the man as he ran out of the restaurant. At least one shot hit the fleeing robber.

[The robber was later arrested when he sought medical care for his wound.] ...

"I'm glad they were here because if that girl couldn't open the register, and he didn't get [any] money, he might have started shooting," Bajalia said. 1

[It was] 1:30 a.m. when Angelic Nichole Hite, 26, the night manager, and Victoria Elizabeth Shaver, 20, the assistant manager at the Pizza Hut at 4450 Creedmoor Road, were leaving the restaurant with Marty Lee Hite, 39, the manager's husband. He had come to pick her up after work.

They saw a man wearing a ski mask, dark clothes, gloves, and holding a pistol walking toward them, and the Hites ran back inside the restaurant. Shaver apparently had reached her car already.... The couple couldn't close the door behind them because the robber ran up and wedged the barrel of his handgun in the opening. As they struggled to get the door closed,... the masked man twice said he would kill them if they didn't open it.

Marty Hite, who carried a .38-caliber handgun, pulled out his weapon and fired three times through the opening, striking the robber in the abdomen and upper chest. The would-be bandit

160/CHAPTER EIGHT

staggered away, and the Hites locked the door and called police.

The Wake County district attorney will review the shooting, but Raleigh police did not file charges against the manager's husband. Police said it appeared the couple retreated as far as they could and feared for their lives, which would make it a justified shooting. 2

Many factors influence crime, with arrest and conviction rates being the most important. However, nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws are also important, and they are the most cost-effective means of reducing crime. The cost of hiring more police in order to change arrest and conviction rates is much higher, and the net benefits per dollar spent are only at most a quarter as large as the benefits from concealed-handgun laws. 3 Even private, medium-security prisons cost state governments about $34 a day per prisoner ($12,267 per year). 4 For concealed handguns, the permit fees are usually the largest costs borne by private citizens. The durability of guns allows owners to recoup their investments over many years. Using my yearly cost estimate of $43 per concealed handgun for Pennsylvanians, concealed handguns pay for themselves if they have only %&5 of the deterrent impact of an additional year in prison. This calculation even ignores the other costs of the legal system, such as prosecution and defense costs—criminals will expend greater effort to fight longer prison sentences in court. No other government policy appears to have anywhere near the same cost-benefit ratio as concealed-handgun laws.

Allowing citizens without criminal records or histories of significant mental illness to carry concealed handguns deters violent crimes and appears to produce an extremely small and statistically insignificant change in accidental deaths. If the rest of the country had adopted right-to-carry concealed-handgun provisions in 1992, about 1,500 murders and 4,000 rapes would have been avoided. On the other hand, consistent with the notion that criminals respond to incentives, county-level data provide some evidence that concealed-handgun laws are associated with increases in property crimes involving stealth and in crimes that involve minimal probability of contact between the criminal and the victim. Even though both the state-level data and the estimates that attempt to explain why the law and the arrest rates change indicate that crime in all the categories declines, the deterrent effect of nondiscretionary handgun laws is largest for violent crimes. Counties with the largest populations, where the deterrence of violent crimes is the greatest, are also the counties

SOME FINAL THOUGHTS/161

where the substitution of property crimes for violent crimes by criminals is the highest. The estimated annual gain in 1992 from allowing concealed handguns was over $5.74 billion.

Many commonly accepted notions are challenged by these findings. Urban areas tend to have the most restrictive gun-control rules and have fought the hardest against nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws, yet they are the very places that benefit the most from nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws. Not only do urban areas tend to gain in their fight against crime, but reductions in crime rates are greatest precisely in those urban areas that have the highest crime rates, largest and most dense populations, and greatest concentrations of minorities. To some this might not be too surprising. After all, law-abiding citizens in these areas must depend on themselves to a great extent for protection. Even if self-protection were accepted, concerns would still arise over whether these law-abiding citizens would use guns properly. This study provides a very strong answer: a few people do and will use permitted concealed handguns improperly, but the gains completely overwhelm these concerns.

Another surprise involves women and blacks. Both tend to be the strongest supporters of gun control, yet both obtain the largest benefits from nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws in terms of reduced rates of murder and other crimes. Concealed handguns also appear to be the great equalizer among the sexes. Murder rates decline when either more women or more men carry concealed handguns, but the effect is especially pronounced for women. An additional woman carrying a concealed handgun reduces the murder rate for women by about three to four times more than an additional man carrying a concealed handgun reduces the murder rate for men. Providing a woman with a concealed handgun represents a much larger change in her ability to defend herself than it does for a man.

The benefits of concealed handguns are not limited to those who use them in self-defense. Because the guns may be concealed, criminals are unable to tell whether potential victims are carrying guns until they attack, thus making it less attractive for criminals to commit crimes that involve direct contact with victims. Citizens who have no intention of ever carrying concealed handguns in a sense get a "free ride" from the crime-fighting efforts of their fellow citizens. However, the "halo" effect created by these laws is apparently not limited to people who share the characteristics of those who carry the guns. The most obvious example is the drop in murders of children following the adoption of nondiscretionary laws. Arming older people not only may provide direct protection to these children, but also causes criminals to leave the area.