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

permitting rates, which in turn lets us link the permitting rate to changes in crime. Permit prices, the amount of training required to get a permit, the length of time that permitting rules have been in effect, and the crime rate are all important factors in determining how many people will get permits. Permitting fees and prices charged for training courses are expected to reduce the number of permits issued, but another important cost of getting a permit is the time spent meeting the requirements. This is not to say that there are not also benefits from training (that is a separate issue), but in the narrow issue of how many permits will be issued, there is no doubt that longer training requirements discourage some people from getting permits.

What permitting rules are in place largely depends upon when the laws were first enacted. States that adopted right-to-carry laws more recently tend to have more restrictive licensing requirements. For example, the three states (Alaska, Arizona, and Texas) requiring at least ten hours of training adopted their rules during the last few years of the sample, and Arizona is the only right-to-carry state that requires additional training when permits are renewed. Six of the eight states with permitting fees of at least $100 have also enacted the law during the last few years. This raises the concern that the drops in crime from the passage of right-to-carry laws may be smaller in the states that have most recently adopted these laws simply because they have issued fewer permits.

Based on state-level data, table 9.2 shows the impact of permit fees, training requirements, and how long (in years) the law has been in effect. Because the evidence indicates that the number of new permits is likely to trail off over time, the estimates include both the number of years the law has been in effect and the number of years squared. Fees and training requirements were first investigated without square terms. Notice that only a small fraction of the population gets permits, ranging from less than 1 percent to 6 percent. With that in mind, the regression results show that for each $10 increase in fees, the population getting permits is reduced by about one half of a percentage point. And requiring five hours of training (rather than none) reduces the number of permits by about two-thirds of a percentage point. In a typical state without any fees or training requirements, the percentage of the population with permits would grow from about 3 percent to a little less than 6 percent after a decade.

Table 9.2 What determines the rate at which people obtain permits?

Percentage of the state population with permits

-.5%*

6.1%*

*The result is significant at the 1 percent level for a two-tailed t-test.

I also ran more complicated specifications including squared terms for fees and training requirements. They give similar results: fees discourage people from obtaining permits over almost the entire range (until fees go over $130, which is near the highest fee in the sample—$140 for Texas). Anecdotal evidence from newspapers indicates that yet another factor is important: the fear of an attack. Thus, crime and multiple-victim public shootings increase gun sales and concealed-handgun permits. 16 Other variables, such as violent-crime rates, murder rates, the number of multiple-victim public shootings, or the death rate from those attacks, are also important for determining how many people get permits, but they do not alter the impact of the previously mentioned variables. Each additional multiple-victim public shooting increases a state's number of permits by about two-tenths of a percentage point, and each additional person who is killed in such a shooting (per 1 million people living in a state) increases handgun permits by one-tenth of a percentage point.

The Crime Rate and the Estimated Number of Concealed Handguns

The above estimates allow us to revisit the impact of permits and crime rates. While the time-series data on permits issued in different states are relatively short, we do have detailed information on the factors that help determine the number of permits (the fees, training requirements, and how long the law has been in effect). The results from the specification shown in table 9.2 were used to construct "predicted values." Constructing a predicted percentage of a state's population with permits allows us to do more than relying on how crime rates change over time or on the anecdotal evidence I obtained from surveying different state permitting agencies.

These new results using state-level data, shown in table 9.3, indicate that violent-crime rates fell across the board as more permits were issued, with the largest drop occurring for robberies. These results correspond closely to the diagrams reported in figures 4.6—4.9 and 7.1—7.4, which indicate that robberies and rapes are most dramatically affected by the number of years that right-to-carry laws are in effect. The coefficients imply that for every 1,000 additional people with permits, there are 0.3 fewer murders, 2.4 fewer rapes, 21 fewer robberies, and 14.1 fewer aggravated assaults. 17 On the other hand, with the exception of burglary, property crime remained statistically unchanged as more people obtained permits.

Would society benefit from more people getting permits? As already noted, obtaining a permit costs money and takes time. Carrying around a gun is also inconvenient, and many states impose penalties if the gun does not remain concealed. 18 On the positive side, permit holders benefit from having the gun for protection and might also come to the rescue of others. But perhaps just as important are the benefits to general crime deterrence produced by concealed-carry laws, for they also help protect others indirectly, as criminals do not know which people can defend themselves until they attack. This raises the real risk that too few people will get permits, as permit holders personally bear all these costs but produce large benefits for others.

Whether too few permits are being issued depends on how the crime rate changes as more and more