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

the consent decree is in effect, overall violent crimes rise by 2.4 percent and property crimes rise by 1.9 percent.

Toble 9.4 Accounting for policing policies using city-level doto

Percent change in various crime rates for changes in explanatory variables

Violent

crime Murder

AggravatedProperty Auto

Rape Robberyassault crime BurglaryLarceny theft

Change in the crime rate from—1.2%**

the difference in the annual

change in crime rates in the

years before and after the

adoption of a right-to-carry

law (annual rate of change

after the law — annual rate

of change before the law) Change in the crime rate after 2.4%*

imposition of a consent

decree regarding the hiring

of police officers Change in the average crime —3.3% a

rate after implementation of

community policing

-2.7%*

0.4%*

2.2%

-1.5%**-1.0%* -0.6% 0.92%** 1.0

-0.27% 3.5%* 1.4%*

1.9%*

0.7%** 1.2%*

2.4%* 2.0%* 0.5%*

rate after implementation of

problem-orientated policing Change in the average crime -0.8% 6.7% c -10.1% a -3.8% 2.3% -6.4% a -5.6% a -12.3% a 18.2% a

rate after implementation of

broken-window policing Average crime rate after 9.3% 14.7% d 6.8% 7.9% d 15.8% c -0.6% 2.7% -4.9% 11%

adoption of one-gun-a-

month purchase rule Change in the average crime 9.6% a 18.4% a 11.9% 4.1% 17.2% a 13% a 10.6% b 14.3% c 11% C

rate in a state after a

neighboring state adopts a

one-gun-a-month rule

•The result is significant at the 1 percent level for a two-tailed t-test. The result is significant at the 5 percent level for a two-tailed t-test. c The result is significant at the 10 percent level for a two-tailed t-test. d The result is significant at the 12 percent level for a two-tailed t-test. *The F-test is significant at the 1 percent level. **The F-test is significant at the 5 percent level. ***The F-test is significant at the 10 percent level.

The evidence for the before-and-after average crime rates for the different types of policing policies is more mixed, and my research does not attempt to deal with issues of why the different rules were adopted to begin with. 32 In ten cases, the policing policies produce significant reductions in crime, but in six cases there are significant increases in crime. Including cases that are not statistically significant still produces no consistent pattern: the policing policies are associated with declines in crime in fifteen cases and increases in twelve cases. A possible explanation for such results might be that adopting new policing policies reallocates resources within the police department, causing some crime rates to go down while others go up. Indeed, each of the three policing policies is associated with increases in some categories of crime and decreases in others. It is difficult to pick out many patterns, but community policing reduces violent crimes at the expense of increased property crimes.

Revisiting Multiple-Victim Public Shootings

Student eyewitnesses and shooting victims of the Pearl High School (Mississippi) rampage used phrases like "unreal" and "like a horror movie" as they testified Wednesday about seeing Luke Woodham methodically point his deer rifle at them and pull the trigger at least six times.... The day's most vivid testimony came from a gutsy hero of the day. Assistant principal Joel Myrick heard the initial shot and watched Woodham choosing his victims. When Woodham appeared headed for a science wing where early classes were already under way, Myrick ran for his pickup and grabbed his .45-caliber pistol. He rounded the school building in time to see Woodham leaving the school and getting into his mother's white Chevy Corsica. He watched its back tires smoke from Woodham's failure to remove the parking brake. Then he ordered him to stop. "I had my pistol's sights on him. I could see the whites of his knuckles" on the steering wheel, Myrick said. He reached into the car and opened the driver-side door, then ordered Woodham to lie on the ground. "I put my foot on his back area and pointed my pistol at him," Myrick testified. 33

Multiple-victim public shootings were not a central issue in the gun debate when I originally finished writing this book in the spring of 1997. My results on multiple-victim public shootings, presented in chapter 5, were obtained long before the first public school attacks occurred in October 1997. Since that time, two of the eight public school shootings (Pearl, Mississippi, and Edinboro, Pennsylvania) were stopped only when citizens with guns interceded. 34 In the Pearl, Missis-

sippi, case, Myrick stopped the killer from proceeding to the nearby junior high school and continuing his attack there. These two cases also involved the fewest people harmed in any of the attacks. The armed citizens managed to stop the attackers well before the police even had arrived at the scene—4!£ minutes before in the Pearl, Mississippi, case and 11 minutes before in Edinboro.

In a third instance, at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, an armed guard was able to delay the attackers and allow many students to escape the building, even though he was assigned to the school because he had failed to pass his shooting proficiency test. The use of homemade grenades, however, prevented the guard from fighting longer. There is some irony in Dylan Klebold, one of the two killers, strongly opposing the proposed right-to-carry law that was being considered in Colorado at the time of the massacre. 35 In the attack on the Jewish community center in Los Angeles in which five people were wounded,