More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws.

Shughart, William F., II

By John R. Lott, Jr. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998, Pp. x, 225. $23.00.

People who call themselves economists without committing a fraud on the profession regard the first law of demand as the first principle of economizing behavior. Confronted with an obvious empirical application of this principle, neoclassical economists, at least those who have managed to avoid falling into the everything-is-possible game-theory trap, instinctively want to gather data and to estimate the magnitude of the theory's prediction. Is the inverse relationship between the price of something and the amount of it individuals choose to consume statistically significant when other relevant factors are held constant? And, if so, how large is the ceteris paribus own-price effect? Although the size and significance of the empirical results might be the subject of considerable econometric debate, no economist worthy of the label would obstinately question the direction of the relationship. When the price of something goes up, less of it will be consumed. The only issue worthy of scholarly controversy is, how much less?

In 1997, John Lott and David Mustard (1997) published a lengthy study concluding from extensive empirical evidence that criminals respond to changes in the cost of committing crimes in ways predicted by models of rational behavior. Specifically, they examined the impact of so-called nondiscretionary (or "shall-issue") gun laws that allow private citizens to carry weapons concealed on their persons. Prior to the enactment of these laws, which are by now on the books in 31 states altogether (most of which have adopted the laws since 1985), local law enforcement officials exercised considerable discretion in decisions to issue concealed handgun permits, with the burden of proving need falling on the applicant. Shall-issue laws essentially eliminate that discretion, requiring concealed weapons permits to be granted to all individuals who pay the required fee and meet other minimal qualifications, including age restrictions, absence of a criminal record, and no history of mental illness.

Reasoning that making it easier for private citizens to arm themselves would increase criminals' expected costs of confronting their prey (who may or may not be carrying concealed weapons), Lott and Mustard hypothesized that shall-issue laws would produce reductions in crime rates, particularly violent crimes such as murder, rape, and robbery, where retaliation by a possibly armed victim poses the greatest threat to the perpetrator. Because the hypothesized reductions in violent crime rates in shall-issue states might be offset to some extent by substitution effects, such as increases in nonviolent crimes (against property, for instance) in those same jurisdictions and increases in violent crimes in jurisdictions having more restrictive gun laws (as criminals rationally shift their predatory activities across borders), the overall impact of the change in gun law regimes is an empirical question. Employing a county-level data set consisting of some 54,000 observations (more than 3000 counties over an 18-year time span), Lott and Mustard reported a variety of statistical results supporting the conclusion that criminals respond to shall-issue laws in the ways predicted by the first law of demand.

Even before the paper was published, however, because the authors posted the manuscript on the Internet and made their data available to anyone who requested it, John Lott became the target of a vicious publicity campaign attacking his scholarship and assassinating his character. Enemies of a plain reading of the constitutional guarantee of the right to bear arms accused him of being an intellectually dishonest shill whose research was bought and paid for by progun pressure groups. The basis for this scurrilous charge? Lott is the John M. Olin Visiting Law and Economics Fellow at the University of Chicago, a position funded by the John M. Olin Foundation. Although it is true that the Olin Corporation, which is the source of the Olin family fortune, is a manufacturer of ammunition (though not of guns, as the critics initially claimed), the Olin Foundation is, in the words of its president, William E. Simon, "as independent of the Olin Corp. as the Ford Foundation is of the Ford Motor Co." (p. A15).

The personal (and, to those who know him, completely unfounded) attacks on John Lott's integrity were made with such ferocity and in so many media outlets nationwide that one can only conclude that Lott was, with apologies to our gracious First Lady, the target of a vast left-wing conspiracy to discredit his politically incorrect findings. In More Guns, Less Crime, Lott responds to the critics with the same careful attention to detail and with the same willingness to debate the issues on their scientific merits that have characterized his demeanor throughout this tempestuous affair. Confident in his own work and genuinely intellectually curious about the causes of crime and the consequences of gun ownership, Lott has eagerly entered the lion's den to debate the evidence. He has appeared on panels at meetings of the Public Choice Society and the American Economic Association (Bronars and Lott 1998), gone on C-SPAN and National Public Radio, and continued to answer his detractors in print (Lott 1998).

With such a large data set to be mined and with so many factors to be controlled for in estimating the marginal impact of concealed handgun laws on crime rates, Lott and Mustard's paper triggered a healthy econometric argument that is far from settled. Issues relating to the sensitivity of the results to the inclusion of certain observations (Black and Nagin 1998) to the specification of the regression model (Dezhbakhsh and Rubin 1998) have led some researchers to conclude that shall-issue laws play a less significant role in deterring violent crime than Lott claims. Other researchers have found that although the direct effects of the laws - the hypothesized reductions in murder, rape, and robbery rates - appear to be empirically robust, the indirect effects on nonviolent crimes may not be (Bartley and Cohen 1998).

Many of these technical issues are explored in More Guns, Less Crime. But the book also addresses a wide range of topics related to its main theme, including the demographics of crime and gun ownership, the roles played by arrest rates and conviction rates in deterring criminal activity, the impact of handgun availability on suicide rates and accidental deaths, and the effects of prepurchase waiting periods and background checks on crime rates.

In Chapter 1, Lott introduces the analysis by recounting some vivid stories illustrating how law-abiding private citizens have successfully fended off criminal attacks by brandishing concealed weapons; Lott also reports some statistical evidence placing handgun violence in perspective. Two of the widely accepted "facts" about the relationship between guns and crime are quickly laid to rest. One is that children are frequently the innocent victims of America's gun culture. According to Lott, there were 1400 accidental deaths involving guns in 1995, but only 200 of these accidents involved children less than 14 years of age. Though tragic, this number is far fewer than the 2900 children who were killed in motor vehicle accidents the same year. As a matter of fact, "more children die in bicycle accidents each year than die from all types of firearm accidents" (p. 9). The other truism is that most murderers "know" their victims, implying that easy access to guns often turns simple domestic arguments into deadly encounters. As Lott points out, however, the FBI's definition of "acquaintance" includes fellow gang members, as well as the customers of drug pushers, hookers, and taxicab drivers. I've wanted to shoot a few cabbies myself, but I wouldn't say that I knew any of them.

Chapter 2 summarizes the existing empirical literature and discusses the relative merits of cross-sectional versus time-series analysis of the link between gun law regimes and crime rates. Measurement problems, including the problems associated with crime reporting and classification, aggregation, and causation, are also addressed. The advantages of county-level data, which Lott was the first to exploit systematically, are made transparent by comparisons of within-state and across-state variations in some key variables.

The demographics of gun ownership are explored in Chapter 3. Although polls suggest that the typical gun owner is a white, middle-aged male living in a rural area who identifies himself as a conservative Republican and earns between $30,000 and $75,000 per year, "significant numbers of people in all groups own guns" (p. 38). Almost one in three Democrats admits to owning a gun, as does almost one in four liberals. Increases in the number of female gun owners have been particularly striking recently: Lott notes that "between the years 1988 and 1996, women went from owning guns at 41 percent of the rate of men to over 53 percent" (p. 38). Interestingly, patterns of gun ownership by age and by race seem to have little to do with differences in crime rates across these groups.

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 form the empirical heart of More Guns, Less Crime. Regression estimates at various levels of data aggregation support simple comparisons indicating that violent crime rates are significantly lower in states with concealed-carry laws. Some of Lott's most provocative findings in this regard are that women and blacks seem to gain the most from concealed-weapons laws, that the largest reductions in violent crimes follow the adoption of shall-issue laws in high-crime urban areas where gun laws tend to be the most restrictive and where opponents fight hardest to keep nondiscretionary concealed-weapons laws off the books, that criminals are dissuaded more by the probability of being arrested than by the probability of being convicted, and that waiting periods and background checks have little, if any, crime-deterring benefits. Visual displays of quantitative information consistently drive home the point that the observed reductions in violent crime rates following the adoption of shall-issue laws were not pure happenstance: crime rates tended to be rising, not falling, prior to the changes in gun law regimes.

Lott responds to his critics in Chapter 7, "The Political and Academic Debate". He lists 23 specific empirical and methodological concerns with his and Mustard's 1997 study and calmly rebuts them.

In colonial America, all able-bodied men were required to own firearms and risked fines if they failed to muster in response to the tocsin calling the militia to assemble. In late twentieth-century America, based on a hitherto unexamined belief that more guns lead to more crime, political elites lobby tirelessly to disarm law-abiding private citizens. John Lott has now tested the conventional wisdom of the instrumental immorality of guns and found it wanting. Given that even the most lavishly funded police force cannot protect every law-abiding citizen against the depredations of those who operate outside the law, increasing the cost to criminals of confronting their victims by allowing concealed weapons appears, on Lott's evidence, to be an effective crime-fighting strategy. To the extent that self-defense is a substitute for police defense, of course, we might expect local and federal law enforcement officials to oppose shall-issue laws. Although the substitution effect may help explain some of the hostility to more permissive gun law regimes, this issue is beyond the scope of More Guns, Less Crime, as is the issue of private gun ownership as a counterweight to governmental threats to personal liberty.

More Guns, Less Crime is controversial and thought-provoking. One doesn't have to agree with all of its empirical findings or accept all of its conclusions to appreciate the extent to which John Lott has raised the level of the debate. Opponents of private gun ownership, who have gotten away with small samples and with the simple analytical demands of the medical journals in which many of their studies have appeared, must meet higher standards of scholarship from now on. More Guns, Less Crime is not the last word on the subject, and John Lott does not suggest that it is. Anyone interested in the important public policy issues it addresses - and willing to keep an open mind - will profit from reading it.

References

Bartley, William Alan, and Mark A. Cohen. 1998. The effect of concealed weapons laws: An extreme bound analysis. Economic Inquiry 36:258-65.

Black, Dan A., and Daniel S. Nagin. 1998. Do right-to-carry laws deter violent crime? Journal of Legal Studies 27:209-19.

Bronars, Stephen G., and John R. Lott, Jr. 1998. Criminal deterrence, geographic spillovers, and the right to carry concealed handguns. American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 88:475-9.

Dezhbakhsh, Hashem, and Paul H. Rubin. 1998. Lives saved or lives lost? The effects of concealed-handgun laws on crime. American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 88:468-74.

Lott, John R., Jr. 1998. The concealed-handgun debate. Journal of Legal Studies 27:221-43.

Lott, John R., Jr., and David B. Mustard. 1997. Crime, deterrence, and right-to-carry concealed handguns. Journal of Legal Studies 26:1-68.

Simon, William E. 1996. Letter to the editor. The Wall Street Journal, 6 September, p. A15.

William F. Shughart II University of Mississippi