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

the newspaper published my letter the following Sunday. 75 In contrast, unfortunately, Ms. Ivins never returned my telephone calls or responded to my E-mail messages and never corrected her claims. 76

Undoubtedly, some of the claims constitute simple mistakes, but more than a few reflect columnists and others being too quick to accept whatever gun-control groups tell them. I will spare the reader the long list of other false claims reported in the press. 77 Yet, obviously, many people, particularly those with gun-control organizations, continually make statements that they know are false—safe in the knowledge that only a tiny fraction of readers or listeners ever check the assertions. Unfortunately, the gun-control organizations risk losing significant credibility only with the few who read the book. 78

Other critiques by academics and the media—some old, some new— require more in-depth discussions. The rest of this section reviews the critiques and then provides my responses.

1How do we know that these findings are not a result of the normal ups and downs in crime rates?

The central problem is that crime moves in waves, yet Lott's analysis does not include variables that can explain these cycles. (David Hemenway, "Book Review of More Guns, Less Crime? New England Journal ofMedicine, December 31, 1998)

Jens Ludwig, assistant professor of public policy at Georgetown University, argued that Lott's data don't prove "anything about what laws do to crime." He noted that crime rates, including homicide, are cyclical: They rise and fall every five to 10 years or so in response to forces that are not well understood. Ludwig suggested that this pattern explains the apparent effectiveness of concealed weapons laws. Imagine, he said, a state where the murder cycle is on the upswing and approaching its peak and public concern is correspondingly high. Then a particularly ghastly mass shooting occurs. Panicked legislators respond by passing a law that allows equally panicked citizens to carry concealed weapons. A year or two later, the murder rate goes down, as Lott's study found. (Richard Morin, "Guns and Gun Massacres: A Contrary View," Washington Post, May 30, 1999, p. B5)

Lott's variables are not good predictors of crime waves. Nor does he provide for any effect of history in the way he models crime. For example, the year 1982 could as well follow 1991 as 1981 in his analyses. (David Hemenway, "More Guns, Less Crime," New England Journal of Medicine, May 20, 1999)

Even my most determined critics concede one point: violent-crime rates fell at the point in time that the right-to-carry laws went into effect. The real question is: Why did the crime rates fall? Do these laws simply happen to get passed right when crime rates hit their peaks? Why don't we observe this coincidence of timing for other gun-control laws?

It is logically possible that such coincidental timing could take place. But there is more evidence besides decreases in crime after right-to-carry laws are adopted. First, the size of the drop is closely related to the number of permits issued (as indicated in the first edition and confirmed by the additional data shown here). Second, the new evidence presented here goes even further: it is not just the number of permits, but also the type of people who obtain permits that is important. For example, high fees discourage the poor, the very people who are most vulnerable to crime, from getting permits. Third, if it is merely coincidental timing, why do violent-crime rates start rising in adjacent counties in states without right-to-carry laws exactly when states which have adopted right-to-carry laws are experiencing a drop in violent crime?

Finally, as the period of time studied gets progressively longer, the results are less likely to be due to crime cycles, since any possible crime "cycles" involve crime not only going down but also "up." If crime happened to hit a peak, say, every ten years, and right-to-carry laws tended to be passed right at the peak, then the reported effect of the law would spuriously show a negative impact right after the enactment. However,

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five years after that an equally large positive spurious effect on crime would have to show up. Instead, my results reveal permanent reductions in crime that only become larger with time, as more people acquire concealed-carry permits.

Furthermore, my study accounted for possible crime cycles in many ways: individual year variables accounted for average national changes in crime rates, and different approaches in chapter 4 controlled for individual state and county time trends and did not take away the effects of concealed carry. To the contrary, they resulted in similar or even stronger estimates for the deterrence effect. Other estimates used robbery or burglary rates to help account for any left-out factors in explaining other crime rates. Since crime rates generally tend to move together, this method also allows one to detect individual county trends. In updating the book, I have included estimates that account for the separate average year-to-year changes in five different regions in the country. Despite all these additional controls the deterrence effect continues to show up strongly.

It is simply false to claim, "nor does he provide for any effect of history," as I have variables that account for "changes" in crime rates from previous years. I have variables that measure explicitly the number of years that the law has been in effect as well as the number of years until it goes into effect. In addition, I have used individual state linear time trends that explicitly allow crime rates to change systematically over time.

Earlier discussions in chapter 7 on crime cycles (pp. 130—31) and causality (pp. 152—54) also explain why these concerns are misplaced.

2Does it make sense to control for nonlinear time trends for each state?

The results suggest that the Lott and Mustard model, which includes only a single national trend, does not adequately capture local time trends in crime rates. To test for this possibility, we