More Guns Less Crime by John Jr (best free e book reader .txt) 📕

or business self-defense but should have most of its preventive impact on street crime and offenses occurring in other public places. But the study contains no qualitative analysis of different patterns within crime categories to corroborate the right-to-carry prevention hypothesis. (Zimring and Hawkins, "Counterfeit Deterrent," p. 54)

Contrary to the claim of Zimring and Hawkins, concealed handguns may very well affect crime in homes and businesses in several ways. First, being allowed to carry a concealed gun outside is likely to increase the number of guns owned by law-abiding citizens. Since these guns will be kept at least part of the time in the home, this should have a deterrent effect on crimes committed at home and also at one's business. Second, as some of the evidence suggests, nondiscretionary laws could even increase the number of crimes that occur in the home as criminals turn away from other crimes, like street robbery, for which the risks that crim-

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inals face have gone up. These two effects would thus work in opposite directions. Finally, to the extent that nondiscretionary handgun laws drive criminals out of a certain geographical area, rates for all types of crimes could fall.

Aggregation of the crime categories makes it difficult to separate all the different substitution effects. Still, the results presented here are very consistent with the two primary dimensions that we focused on: whether there is contact between the criminal and the victim, and whether the crime occurs where law-abiding citizens could already legally carry a gun.

18 Is it reasonable to make comparisons across states?

The sort of state that passes a "shall-issue" law in the 1980s is apt to be the same kind of place where ordinary citizens carrying concealed firearms might not be regarded as a major problem even before the law changed.... Idaho is not the same sort of place that New York is, and there seem to be systematic differences between states that change standards for concealed weapons and those that do not. (Zimring and Hawkins, "Counterfeit Deterrent," pp. 50—51)

The observed drop in crime rates in states that have enacted nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws does not by itself imply that we will observe the same effect in other states that adopt such laws later. Several different issues arise here. First, the regressions used in this book have attempted to control for many differences that can explain the level of crime (for example, income, poverty, unemployment, population and population density, demographic characteristics, law enforcement, other gun laws). Admittedly, even my long list of variables does not pick up all the differences between states, which is the reason that a variable is added for each county or state to pick up the average differences in crime rates across places. Individual time trends are also allowed for each state.

Yet despite all these attempts to control for variables, some caution is still in order—especially when dealing with areas that are particularly extreme along dimensions that do not have obvious counterparts in areas with nondiscretionary laws. One obvious example would be New York City. While the regression results show that areas with the largest and most dense populations gain the most from nondiscretionary laws, there is always the possibility that the relationship changes for values of population and density that are different from those in places where we have been able to study the effects of these laws. To date, the fourth and fifth largest cities in the country have passed nondiscretionary laws (Houston

and Philadelphia), and additional experience with large cities may help determine whether these laws would be equally useful in a city like New York. If one were skeptical about the effects in large cities, the laws should first be changed in Los Angeles and Chicago.

A second issue is whether there is something unique about states that have adopted nondiscretionary laws, and whether that characteristic caused them not only to adopt the laws but also reduced the potential problems resulting from adoption. For example, if local legislators in a few states had special information confirming that the citizens in their state were uniquely trustworthy with regard to concealed handguns, that might have led these few states to pass the laws and have little difficulty with them. It could then "falsely" appear that nondiscretionary laws are generally successful. Such an argument may have been plausible at one time, but its force has declined now that such large and varied areas are covered by these laws. Equally important is the fact that not all jurisdictions have willingly adopted these laws. Many urban areas, such as Atlanta and Philadelphia, fought strongly against them, but lost out to coalitions of rural and suburban representatives. Philadelphia's opposition was so strong that when Pennsylvania's nondiscretionary law was first passed, Philadelphia was partially exempted.

19 Does my discussion provide a "theory" linking concealed-handgun ownership to reductions in crime? Do the data allow me to link the passage of these laws with the reduction in crime?

Two idiosyncratic aspects of the Lott and Mustard analysis deserve special

mention In the first place, there is very little in the way of explicit

theory advanced to explain where and when right-to-carry laws should operate as deterrents to the types of crime that can be frustrated by citizens carrying concealed handguns.... They have no data to measure the critical intermediate steps between passing the legislation and reductions in crime rates. This is the second important failing ... that is not a recurrent feature in econometric studies. (Zimring and Hawkins, "Counterfeit Deterrent," pp. 52, 54)

This set of complaints is difficult to understand. The theory is obvious: A would-be criminal act is deterred by the risk of being shot. Many different tests described in this book support this theory. Not only does the drop in crime begin when nondiscretionary laws are adopted, but the extent of the decline is related to the number of permits issued in a state. Nondiscretionary laws reduce crime the most in