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

hoped that she had it locked up. The wife countered: "Wouldn't that defeat the whole point of having a gun?" The doctor then said, "Yes I guess it would, but I'm required to tell you that."

Sharon Stone, the movie actress, made headlines by publicly announcing her decision to give up her guns "even though she once saved her life by pointing a loaded shotgun at a crazed stalker" after three telephone calls to 911 failed to get the police to arrive. She decided that with all the recent violence and accidents involving guns she was afraid of having guns in her home. 1 Another reaction is the suspension from school of sixth-graders for accidentally having a squirt gun in their backpacks. 2

President Clinton puts forward a program to spend $15 million to buy guns from people living in cities. Andrew Cuomo, the secretary of housing and urban development, warns that "reducing guns reduces crime. We know that. Reducing guns also reduces the number of accidents that occur.... It reduces the number of suicides through guns." 3

Newsweek recently devoted a special issue to guns and violence. 4 Despite thirty-four pages on the topic, the notion of defensive gun use was not mentioned even once. ABC's Nightline has had guests advising people not to use firearms for self-defense and instead suggesting, "We would recommend and possibly assist with a review of the security of the building and if necessary recommend further security to attend the house if they require it." 5 Yet we are not indoors all the time, and even being inside does not guarantee protection.

With all the news coverage of only the bad things that happen with guns and the constant drumbeat of claims from the Clinton administration, I can understand the public's reaction to guns. 6

The news is also filled with brutal crimes against women, but none of the mainstream media mention the possibility of women getting guns to defend themselves. The assumption that the police will always be avail-

able to protect us collides directly with the horrible event that is being covered on the news. What should people do when the police are not able to be there? By contrast, when bad events happen with guns the question that is normally asked is: Are more gun controls needed? No one asks: Did banning guns from certain areas make the law-abiding citizens more vulnerable?

The following sections will examine new data on concealed-handgun laws and ask whether many of the new proposed reforms ranging from safe-storage laws to one-gun-a-month rules will save lives. I then respond to the criticisms made after my book was published.

Updating the Basic Results

I started this research several years ago with data from 1977 to 1992, all the county data that were available at that time. When the book was first published, I had updated the data through 1994. It is now possible to expand the data even further, through 1996. This is quite important, since so many states very recently have passed right-to-carry laws. During 1994, Alaska, Arizona, Tennessee, and Wyoming enacted new right-to-carry laws, and during 1995, Arkansas, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, and Utah followed suit. 7 Between 1977 and 1996 a total of twenty states had changed their laws and had them in effect for at least one full year. 8

Some commentators complained that even though my study was by far the largest statistical crime study ever, there was simply not enough data to properly evaluate the impact of the laws. Others suspected that the findings were simply a result of studying relatively unusual states. 9 Another criticism was that poverty was not properly accounted for. 10

While the methods I used in the book were by far the most comprehensive that I know of, I have continued to look into other methods. By putting together an entirely new data set—using city-level information—it is possible to go beyond my previous efforts to control for policing-policy variables such as arrest and conviction rates, number of police per-capita, expenditures on police per capita, and a proxy for the so-called broken-windows policing policy. The city-level data that I have now compiled include direct information on whether a city has adopted community policing, problem-oriented policing, and/or the broken-windows approach.

One of the commentators on my book suggested that in addition to year-to-year changes in the national crime rate as well as state and county crime trends, another way to account for crime cycles is by measuring whether the crime rates are falling faster in right-to-carry states

than in other states in their region rather than compared to just the nation as a whole. While it is impossible to use a separate variable for each year for each individual state, because that would falsely appear to explain all the year-to-year changes in average crime rates in a state, it is possible to group states together. This new set of estimates would account not only for whether the crime rates in concealed-handgun states are falling relative to the national crime rate but now also for whether they are falling relative to the crime rates in their region. To do this, the country is divided into five regions (Northeast, South, Midwest, Rocky Mountains, and Pacific) and variables are added to measure the year-to-year changes in crime by region. n All county- and city-level regressions will employ these additional control variables.

Some have criticized my earlier work for not doing enough to account for poverty rates. As a response, I have incorporated in this section of the book state-level measures of poverty and unemployment rates in addition to all the county-level variables that accounted for these factors earlier in this book. The execution rates for murders in each state are now included in estimates to explain the murder rate. Finally, new data on the number of permits granted in different states make it easier to link crime