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

from getting drugs to sell, it is dubious that the government would succeed in stopping criminals from acquiring guns to defend their drug turf.

Similar points can be made about one-gun-a-month rules. The cost that they impose upon the law abiding may be small. Yet there is still a security issue here: someone being threatened might immediately want to store guns at several places so that one is always easily within reach. The one-gun-a-month rule makes that impossible. Besides this issue, the rule is primarily an inconvenience for those who buy guns as gifts or who want to take their families hunting.

The enactment dates for the safe-storage laws and one-gun-a-month rules are shown in table 9.5/ 12 For the implementation dates of safe-storage laws, I relied primarily on an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, though this contained only laws passed up

Table 9.5 Enactment dates of other gun control laws

State Date law went into effect*

Safe-storage laws: a

Florida 10/1/89

Iowa 4/5/90

Connecticut 10/1/90

Nevada 10/1/91

California 1/1/92

New Jersey 1/17/92

Wisconsin 4/16/92

Hawaii 6/29/92

Virginia 7/1/92

Maryland 10/1/92

Minnesota 8/1/93

North Carolina 12/1/93

Delaware 10/1/94

Rhode Island 9/15/95

Texas 1/1/96 One-gun-a-month laws: b

South Carolina 1976

Virginia 7/93

Maryland 10/1/96

"Source for the dates of enactment of safe-storage laws through the end of 1993 is Peter Cummings,

David C. Grossman, Frederick P. Rivara, and Thomas D. Koepsell, "State Gun Safe Storage Laws

and Child Mortality Due to Firearms," Journal ofthe American Medical Association, 278 (October 1, 1997):

1084-86. The other dates were obtained from the Handgun Control Web site at http://www.hand-

guncontrol.org/caplaws.htm.

b Data were obtained through a Nexis/Lexis search. Lynn Waltz, "Virginia Law Cuts Gun Pipeline to

Capital's Criminals, Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, September 8, 1996, p. A7.

EPILOGUE/ 199

through the end of 1993. 43 Handgun Control's Web site provided information on the three states that passed laws after this date. The laws share certain common features, such as making it a crime to store firearms in a way that a reasonable person would know allows a child to gain use of a weapon. The primary differences involve exactly what penalties are imposed and the age at which a child's access becomes allowed. While Connecticut, California, and Florida classify such violations as felonies, other states classify them as misdemeanors. The age at which children's access is permitted also varies across states, ranging from twelve in Virginia to eighteen in North Carolina and Delaware. Most state rules protect owners from liability if firearms are stored in a locked box, secured with a trigger lock, or obtained through unlawful entry.

The state-level estimates are shown in table 9.6. Only the right-to-carry laws are associated with significant reductions in crime rates. Among the violent-crime categories, the Brady law is only significantly related to rape, which increased by 3.6 percent after the law passed. (While the coefficients indicate that the law resulted in more murders and robberies but fewer aggravated assaults and as a consequence fewer overall violent crimes, none of those effects are even close to being statistically significant.) Only the impact of the Brady law on rape rates is consistent with the earlier results that we found for the data up through 1994.

Safe-storage rules also seem to cause some real problems. Passage of these laws is significantly related to almost 9 percent more rapes and robberies and 5.6 percent more burglaries. In terms of total crime in 1996, the presence of the law in just these fifteen states was associated with 3,600 more rapes, 22,500 more robberies, and 64,000 more burglaries. These increases might reflect the increased difficulty victims have in reaching a gun to protect themselves. However, a contributing factor might be the horror stories that often accompany the passage of these laws, reducing people's desire to own a gun in the first place. The increase in burglaries is particularly notable. Burglars appeared to be less afraid of entering homes after these laws were passed. Additional state data would be required to answer the question of whether "hot burglaries"—burglaries occurring while the residents are in the dwelling—increased and whether burglars spent less time casing dwellings after these laws were passed. Evidence of these other changes would help confirm that these laws have emboldened criminals.

On the other side of this question is the number of accidental gun deaths that will be prevented. The General Accounting Office reported in 1991 that mechanical safety locks are unreliable in preventing children over six years of age from using a gun, 44 but there is still the question of

Table 9.6 Evaluating other gun-control laws using state-level data

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)

Change in the average crime rate after the adoption of Brady law

Change in the average crime rate after the adoption of safe-storage rules

-2.0%*

-2.4%

0.04%

-3.2%*

3.6%

1.3%

-1.4%* -3.8%* -2.3%*

3.6% a 0.02% -4.2%

8.9% a 8.9% a -4.4%

-1.3%* -2.9%* -0.8%*** 0.06%

-0.6% 0.7% -0.6%

2.5%

EPILOGUE / 201

how many of these children's lives might have been saved, and even if locks are unreliable for older children, some deaths may be prevented. Even if one believes that the high-end estimated benefits are