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

Reviewing the Basic Results

The central question is, How did crime rates change before and after the right-to-carry laws went into effect? The test used earlier in this book examined the difference in the time trends before and after the laws were enacted. 12 With the extended data and the additional variables for the year-to-year changes in crime by region (so-called regional fixed year effects), state poverty, unemployment, and death-penalty execution rates, table 9.1 shows that this pattern closely resembles the pattern found earlier in the book: violent-crime rates were rising consistently before the right-to-carry laws and falling thereafter. 13 The change in these before-and-after trends was always extremely significant—at least at the 0.1 percent level. Compared to the results for tables 4.8 or 4.13, the effects were larger for overall violent crimes, rape, robbery, and aggravated assaults and smaller for murder. For each additional year that the laws were in effect, murders fell by an additional 1.5 percent, while rape, robbery, and aggravated assaults all fell by about by 3 percent each year. The other variables continued to produce results similar to those that were found earlier. 14

While no previous crime study accounts for year-to-year changes in regional crime rates, it is possible to go even beyond that and combine

Table 9.1 Reexamining the change in time trends before and after the adoption of nondiscretionary laws, using additional data for 1995 and 1996

Percent change in various crime rates for changes in explanatory variables

Violent AggravatedProperty

crime MurderRape Robberyassault crime

BurglaryLarceny

Auto theft

Change in the crime rate from the difference in the annual change in crime rates in the years before and after the adoption of the right-to-carry law (annual rate of change after the law — annual rate of change before the law)

-13%*

-1.5%*

-3.2%*

-1.9%*

-3.0%*

-1.6%*

-2.5%*

-0.9%*

-2.1%*

Note: This table uses county-level violent and property-crime data from the Uniform Crime Report that were not available when I originally wrote the book. All regressions use weighted least squares, where the weighting is each county's population. The regressions correspond to those in tables 4.8 and 4.13. The one difference from the earlier estimates is that these regressions now also allow the regional fixed effects to vary by year.

different approaches. Including not only the factors accounted for in table 9.1 but also individual state time trends produces similar results. The annual declines in crime from right-to-carry laws are greater for murder (2.2 percent), rape (3.9 percent), and robbery rates (4.9 percent), while the impact on aggravated assaults (0.8 percent) and the property crime rates (0.9 percent) is smaller.

Figures 9.1-9.5 illustrate how the violent-crime rates vary before and

400-

300"

-10 -8 -6 -4 -2 0 2 4 6 8 10 Years before and after the adoption of concealed-handgun laws Figure 9.1. The effect of concealed-handgun laws on violent crimes

-10 -6 0 5 10

Years before and after the adoption of concealed-handgun laws

Figure 9.2. The effect of concealed-handgun laws on murders

8

-10-5 0 5 10

Years before and after the adoption of concealed-handgun laws Figure 9.3. The effect of concealed-handgun laws on rapes

140

I

-10 -5 0 5 10

Years before and after the adoption of concealed-handgun laws Figure 9.4. The effect of concealed-handgun laws on robberies

after the implementation of right-to-carry laws when both the linear and squared time trends are employed. Despite expanding the data through 1996 so that the legal changes in ten additional states could be examined, the results are similar to those previously shown in figures 4.5—4.9. 15 As in the earlier results, the longer the laws are in effect, the larger the decline in violent crime. The most dramatic results are again for rape and

9 "5

-10-5 0 5 10

Years before and after the adoption of concealed-handgun laws Figure 9.5. The effect of concealed-handgun laws on aggravated assaults

robbery rates, which were rising before the right-to-carry law was passed and falling thereafter. Robbery rates continue rising during the first full year that the law is in effect, but the rate of increase slows and begins to fall by the second year. It is this continued increase in robbery rates which keeps the violent crimes as a whole from immediately declining. While aggravated assaults were falling on average before the right-to-carry law was adopted, figure 9.5 shows that the rate of decline accelerated after the law went into effect.

What Determines the Number of Permits Issued and What Is the Net Benefit from Issuing AnotherPermit?

The Number of Permits

The relationship between the percentage of the population with permits and the changes in crime rates is central to much of the debate over the right to carry. My previous work was based on the number of permits issued for counties in Oregon and Pennsylvania as well as on discussions with various government officials on what types of counties issued the most permits. The comparison across states assumed that what created the difference in permit rates across counties also applied across states. Some more state-level data have now become available on permit rates, but such data are still relatively scarce. In addition to Florida, Oregon,

and Pennsylvania, I have also acquired some annual permit-rate data up to 1996 for Alaska, Arizona, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming, though these states had these rules in effect for no more than a few years.

While these data are limited, they allow us to examine what factors determine