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

adopting the law were experiencing a drop. But that is not all. The size of the spillover is larger if the neighboring counties are closely matched to each other in population density. In other words, criminals in more urban areas (as measured by population density) are more likely to move across the border if the neighboring county is also urban. Ayres and Donohue argue that different parts of the country may have experienced different impacts from the crack epidemic. Yet if you have two urban counties next to each other, how can the Ayres and Donohue discussion explain why one urban county would face a crime increase from drugs when the neighboring urban county is experiencing a drop? Such an isolation would be particularly surprising given that these counties are known to be closely tied to each other in terms of criminals moving between them.

The timing of changes in right-to-carry laws also makes their argument less plausible. Ayres and Donohue do not explain why the local changes in the cocaine market just happen to coincide with the passage

of right-to-carry laws, which have occurred at very different times in different states.

Other points are relevant to this issue. While the violent-crime rates fell across the entire state, the biggest drops occurred in the most crime-prone, heavily urbanized areas. Even if states that tend to adopt right-to-carry laws also "tend to be Republican and have high NRA membership and low crime rates" and thus to be less typical of the states where crack is a problem, there still exist high-crime counties within the state that do not fit the overall state profile. Indeed, it is those densely populated, high-crime counties that experience the biggest drops in violent crime. Finally, using the data up through 1996 produces similar results. Since so many states adopted right-to-carry laws at different times during the 1990s, it is not clear how cocaine or crack can account for the particular pattern claimed by Ayres and Donohue. Indeed, if anything, since the use of cocaine appears to have gradually spread to more rural states over time and subsided in areas where it had originally been a problem, the differences in trend that they are concerned about may have even been the reverse of what they conjecture.

5Do right-to-carry laws significantly reduce the robbery rate?

Was there substitution from violent crime to property crime? Lott found

that the laws were associated with an increase in property crime Lott

argues that this change occurred because criminals respond to the threat of being shot while committing such crimes as robbery by choosing to commit less risky crimes that involve minimal contact with the victim. Unfortunately for this argument, the law was not associated with a significant decrease in robberies. In fact, when data for 1993 and 1994 was included, it was associated with a small (not statistically significant) increase in robberies. The law was associated with a significant reduction in assaults, but there does not seem to be any reason why criminals might substitute auto theft for assault. (Tim Lambert, "Do More Guns Cause Less Crime?" from his posting on his Web site at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales [http:// www.cse.unsw.EDU AU/ ~ lambert/guns/lott/])

Q. What's your take on John Lott's study and subsequent book that concludes concealed weapon laws lower the crime rate? (Lott's book is titled "More Guns, Less Crime," University of Chicago Press, 1998.)

A. His basic premise in his study is that these laws encourage private citizens to carry guns and therefore discourage criminal attacks, like homicides and rapes. Think for a second. Most murders and rapes occur in

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homes. So where would you see the greatest impact if his premise were true? You would see it in armed robbery. But there's no effect on armed robbery. His study is flawed, but it's costing us enormous problems. People are citing it everywhere. (Quote in the St. Paul, Minnesota, newspaper the Pioneer Planet, August 3,1998, from an interview with Bob Walker, president of Handgun Control, Inc.)

Both the preceding quotes and many other criticisms are based on not recognizing that a law can be associated with reduced crime even when the average crime rate in the period after the law is the same as or higher than the average crime rate before the law 87 For example, look at the four diagrams in figure 9.17. The first two diagrams show dramatic changes in crime rates from the law, but very different before-and-after average crime rates. In the first diagram (17a), the average crime rate after the law is lower than the average crime rate before it, while the reverse is true in the second diagram. The second diagram (lib) corresponds to an example in which the simple variable measuring the average effect from the law would have falsely indicated that the law actually "increased" the average crime rate, while in actual fact the crime rate was rising right up

Crime rate

Crime rate

Years before and after the adoption of the law Years before and after the adoption of the law a b

Crime rate

Crime rate

Years before and after the adoption of the law Years before and after the adoption of the law

c d

Figure 9.17. Why looking at only the before-and-after average crime rates is so misleading

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until the law passed and falling thereafter. If I had another figure where the inverted V shape was perfectly symmetrical, the before-and-after averages would have been the same. (With this in mind, it would be useful to reexamine the earlier estimates for robbery shown in figures 4.8 and 7.4.)

The third diagram (17c) illustrates the importance of looking at more than simple before-and-after averages in another way. A simple variable measuring the before-and-after averages would indicate that the average crime rate