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

Further, not everyone will benefit equally from the abolition of guns. For example, criminals will still maintain a large strength advantage over many of their victims (such as women and the elderly). To the extent that guns are an equalizer, their elimination will strengthen criminals relative to physically weak victims. As we have seen in discussing international crime data, eliminating guns alters criminals* behavior in other ways, such as reducing their fear of breaking into homes while the residents are there.

All these discussions, of course, ignore the issues that led the founding fathers to put the Second Amendment in the Constitution in the first place—important issues that are beyond the scope of this book. 18 They believed that an armed citizenry is the ultimate bulwark against tyrannical government. Possibly our trust in government has risen so much that we no longer fear what future governments might do. Having just fought a war for their independence against a government that had tried to confiscate their guns, the founding fathers felt very strongly about this issue.

What Can We Conclude?

How much confidence do I have in these results? The largest previous study on gun control produced findings similar to those reported here but examined only 170 cities within a single year. This book has examined over 54,000 observations (across 3,000 counties for eighteen years) and has controlled for a range of other factors never accounted for in previous crime studies. I have attempted to answer numerous questions. For example, do higher arrest or conviction rates reduce crime? What about changes in other handgun laws, such as penalizing the use of a gun in the commission of a crime, or the well-known waiting periods? Do income, poverty, unemployment, drug prices, or demographic changes matter? All these factors were found to influence crime rates, but no previous gun study had accounted for changing criminal penalties, and this study is the first to look at more than a few of any of these other considerations. Preventing law-abiding citizens from carrying handguns does not end

violence; it merely makes victims more vulnerable to attack. While people have strong views on either side of this debate, and one study is unlikely to end this discussion, the size and strength of my deterrence results and the lack of evidence that holders of permits for concealed handguns commit crimes should at least give pause to those who oppose concealed handguns. In the final analysis, one concern unites us all: Will allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns save lives? The answer is yes, it will.

Nine Epilogue

The Fear of Guns

A real fear about guns exists these days. Recently, I was picked up by a taxicab driver who told me that his wife had taken his gun and destroyed it. He had owned the gun for over twenty-five years and had served in the military, but his wife hadn't talked to him before she destroyed it. With all the news coverage on the shootings, accidental gun deaths, and murders committed with guns, his wife was simply terrified about keeping the gun in the home any longer. He hadn't tried to replace it, simply because his wife's opposition was so "emotional" and "strong" that it simply didn't make any sense to argue with her. Having served in the military, the cab driver had no problem with guns, but his wife had always refused to touch the weapon. In fact, he wasn't even sure how it had been possible for her to touch the gun long enough to get it removed from the house. The driver was concerned about crime and had kept the gun around the home for self-protection, and he had made that argument to her. But he described how his wife was fearful that there would be an accident with the gun.

His story reminded me of my own wife's feelings about guns. Before I had started this research, my home had been a "gun-free zone." More than banning real guns, however, my wife had insisted that our children not even play with toy guns because she didn't want her children growing up to be comfortable even around toy guns. I had never felt strongly enough about the issue to argue with her; indeed, it had never occurred to me even to bother arguing with her. I understood the cab driver's reaction to his wife's throwing out his gun—you pick your fights in a relationship; you simply don't bother arguing about something that you don't really care a lot about when your partner feels so intensely about the issue. However, since my research into this area we have indeed purchased a gun.

Unfortunately, the cab driver's experience is not that unusual. A researcher at the University of Chicago Medical School called me about the harassment that her husband—a police officer and federally licensed firearms dealer—was facing from the city council in Muncie, Indiana.

Her husband sold only about ten to twelve guns a year to other police officers, and she said that with the high licensing fees, he was losing money doing this. He simply did it as a service for the other police officers. In any case, the city council was claiming that he had not filled out the proper forms notifying them that he was a dealer. He denies this and faces fines and a possible loss of his license. The city council was apparently concerned about accidental gun deaths that might arise from the guns that he sold.

The wife of a fellow economist recently went to a doctor's office at the University of Chicago hospital, where she was asked to fill out the typical forms about past medical history. One question asked whether she owned a gun. When the doctor saw that she had answered yes, the doctor warned her about the dangers of having a gun in the home and said that she