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

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

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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