Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't by John Jr. (books that read to you TXT) 📕

the permitting process tends to be law-abiding by nature. Most criminals, in contrast, aren’t the type to go through the approval process, submit to a criminal background check, and pay their fees. For example, during the nineteen years between October 1, 1987 and December 31, 2006, Florida issued 1,228,284 concealed weapons permits but revoked just 158, or .01 percent, for any type of firearms violation. Even this figure exaggerates the risks, as almost all of these revocations were for non-threatening incidents such as unknowingly carrying a gun into a restricted area.88 What’s more, the rate of permit revocations in Florida has fallen over time, with zero to one revocations for firearms violations being recorded in each of the last five years.89 Studying the issue, the National Journal found that permit holders “turn out to be unusually law-abiding, safer even than off-duty cops.”90

It is also clear that legally owning a gun makes a person less likely to get hurt by a criminal. While police are, of course, extremely important in fighting crime, officers almost always arrive at the scene only after a crime has been committed. So what can individuals themselves do to deter criminals? Having a gun, in fact, is by far the most effective course of action. This is the finding of the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey, an annual survey conducted since 1973 of about 77,000 households comprising nearly 134,000 people.91 This holds true whether the criminal is armed or unarmed and regardless of the location of the attack.

During the 1990s, for example, assault victims who used a gun for self-protection were injured 3.6 percent of the time. This contrasts with 5.4 percent of those who ran or drove away, 12.6 percent of those who screamed, and 13.6 percent of those who threatened the attacker without a weapon. Those who took no self-protective action at all fared the worst—55.2 percent of them were injured.92 Gandhi’s strategy of peaceful resistance may have worked against British imperialists who could be embarrassed by public attention, but criminals require other methods of persuasion.

Economist Stephen Bronars and I found significant evidence that criminals move out of areas where concealed handguns are legalized.93 Our study analyzed counties that border each other on opposite sides of a state line. In such cases, counties in states that adopt right-to-carry laws see a drop in violent crime that is about four times larger than the simultaneous increase in violent crimes in the adjacent counties without such laws. Violent criminals may be brutal, but they’re not necessarily stupid. At least they’re smart enough to leave towns where they risk running into citizens carrying concealed handguns.

Concealed weapons clearly help to reduce crime. Overall, for the first eight to nine years that concealed-carry laws are in effect, murder rates fall by an average of 1 to 1.5 percent per year, while robbery and rape rates decline by about 2 percentage points.94 The benefits of gun ownership also outweigh the drawbacks such as accidental deaths. These do happen, but they are relatively rare, with 649 cases reported among the nation’s 100 million gun owners in 2004. What’s more, academic research finds that accidental death rates do not increase with the passage of right-to-carry laws.95

Some analysts, however, continue to dispute the deterrent effect of concealed handguns. But even much of the research done by these supposed critics ends up showing substantial safety benefits associated with concealed weapons. For instance, in arguing that more guns create more crime, Mark Duggan provided thirty estimates of the impact of right-to-carry laws.96 But after correcting for four typing mistakes, sixteen of his thirty estimates actually show statistically significant drops in crime, while only one shows a significant increase.97 Some similar problems are found in the other major studies denying that right-to-carry laws reduce crime rates.98

Academic Research by Economists on Right-to-Carry Laws:

Overall, the three crime fighting techniques outlined above—increased use of the death penalty, rising arrest and conviction rates, and the passage of right-to-carry laws—account for between 50 and 60 percent of the drop in murder rates during the 1990s. While all these methods are the subject of much controversy, their effectiveness in reducing crime has been proven time and again.99

What Didn’t Really Matter? Part I

Age and Race

As we saw in our discussion of abortion, different age groups commit crimes at different rates. Violent criminals are overwhelmingly male youths between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five. An offender’s likelihood of committing murder rises until he is twenty years old, then falls after that. By the time a person is twenty-nine, his likelihood of committing murder has declined to about half of what it was at age twenty.100 Although the relative rates that different age groups commit crime vary somewhat over time, in any year the odds of a person in his twenties committing murder are much higher than for those in their thirties. Presumably, if we could magically transform all the twenty-year-olds into thirty-five or forty-year-olds, there would be a huge decline in murder rates. Older people just don’t commit as many violent crimes as the young.

Despite the sensitivity of the subject, it must be mentioned that race is also a very important factor in crime statistics.101 African Americans are the most likely perpetrators of crime as well as the most common victims. In 2002, while the national murder rate was 5.6 per 100,000 people, the rate that African American males between seventeen and twenty-five committed murder was seventy-eight per 100,000, or about fourteen times the national rate. For white males of the same age group, the rate was fourteen per 100,000. It should also be noted that young African American males commit murder at a much higher rate than African Americans in general—in 2002, the overall African American murder rate was 24.1 per 100,000. This was well below its peak rate of 51.4 in 1991, although it is still much higher than the current rate of 3.6 for