More Guns Less Crime (36 page)

EPILOGUE/225

statistically significant at better than the 5 percent level, and their coefficient still implies a drop in before-and-after averages of 4.6 percent.) Dropping 87 percent of the sample and reporting only the specifications examining the before-and-after averages may be Black and Nagin's preferred sample and specification, but even these results imply significant benefits and no cost from passing right-to-carry laws. If they had reported the overall violent-crime rate, they would have shown that overall violent crime fell after the right-to-carry laws were passed.

Table 9.7 provides uses the updated data to examine the importance of dropping out counties with fewer than 100,000 people as well as Florida. The impact of the law is greater for overall violent-crime rates and aggravated assaults and smaller for the other three violent-crime categories. Each additional year after the law goes into effect produces an additional 3 percent drop in violent-crime rates.

When Black and Nagin break down the differences by individual states, they claim to find three crime categories in which one of the ten states had a statistically significant increase in crime rates (West Virginia for murder, Mississippi for rape, and Pennsylvania for robbery). But their results do not show the variation across states, for they are derived from only a small subset of observations from those states. The West Virginia sample included only one of its fifty-five counties, as it was the only one with more than 100,000 people. The Mississippi data included just three of its eighty-two counties. The results reported earlier in table 4.9 provide the information on how the right-to-carry laws affected the crime rates across states.

12 Are the results valid only when Maine and Florida are included?

I will try to summarize the argument here. Ian Ayres and John Donohue are concerned about the inclusion of Maine and Florida for several reasons: (1) the results discussed by Black and Nagin, (2) the issue of whether the crack epidemic might have just happened to cause the relative crime rates to rise in non-right-to-carry states in the late 1980s, and (3) objections to whether Cramer and Kopel were correct in classifying Maine as a right-to-carry state. To satisfy their concerns, Ayres and Donohue use several different approaches, such as dropping both Maine and Florida out of the sample. They also divide the shall-issue dummy variable into two separate variables: a variable to measure the average before-and-after crime rates for those states that adopted their right-to carry laws before December 1987 (Maine and Florida) and a similar variable to measure the average before-and-after crime rates for those states that adopted their crime rates after December 1987.

Table 9.7 What is the impact of removing both counties with fewer than 100,000 people and Florida from the sample?

Percent change in various crime rates for changes in explanatory variables

Violent

crime Murder

Aggravated Property Auto

Rape Robbery assault crime Burglary Larceny theft

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)

-3.3%* -0.45%*

-2.6%** -3.0%*

-4.7%*

-0.8%

-2.1%*

-0.24% -1.8%**

*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.

Ayres and Donohue find that violent-crime rates consistently fall in states adopting right-to-carry laws after 1987, but the effect is often statistically insignificant. The drops in violent crime appear much larger and more significant for the earlier states. Indeed, as reported earlier in this book, Maine and Florida experience two of the three largest overall drops in violent crime (see table 4.9). Yet the focus on the before-and-after averages again obscures the benefits from right-to-carry laws.

The results presented in table 9.8 take the two approaches that I have been using: the estimated number of permits issued in a state and the differences between the trends in crime rates before and after the adoption of the right-to-carry laws. With the exception of rape, Maine and Florida experience greater drops in all violent-crime categories, but all the violent-crime rates decline for states adopting right-to-carry laws during the post-1987 period and all but two of these declines are statistically significant at least at the 10 percent level. The estimates using the percentage of the population with permits imply that there were no statistically different effects for the two sets of states for murder and rape.

13 Was it proper to assume that more permits were issued in the more populous counties after right-to-carry laws were adopted?

Since the links between the issuance of permits and the crime reduction that Lott attributes to the shall issue laws is so crucial to establishing causality, more research on this issue is needed. Lott's county population proxies rely on his assumption that population density is a good predictor of the difficulty in obtaining permits under discretionary laws. However, if many states went directly from prohibiting concealed weapons to a non-discretionary law (like Arizona), Lott's assumed relationship between permits and density would break down. (Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue III, "Nondiscretionary Concealed Weapons Laws: A Case Study of Statistics, Standards of Proof, and Public Policy," American Law and Economics Review 1, nos. 1-2 [Fall 1999]: 446)

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-

EPILOGUE/231

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, December 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.