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

always speculate that criminals' perceptions of risk outran reality, but that is all this is—a speculation. More likely, the declines in crime coinciding with relaxation of carry laws were largely attributable to other factors not controlled in the Lott and Mustard analysis. (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/])

The survey results mentioned by Lambert refer to all transportation or carrying of guns by Americans. They include not only carrying concealed handguns (whether legally or illegally) but also people who have guns with them to go hunting or who may simply be transporting guns between residences. 105 On the other hand, any survey that focused solely on the illegal carrying of concealed handguns prior to the adoption of the law would find it difficult to get people to admit that they had been violating the law.

The 1 percent figure Lambert picks for carrying concealed handguns is also very misleadingly low. As I have shown in this book, permitting rates depend upon many factors (such as the level of fees and the amount of training required), but they also depend crucially on the number of years that the permitting rules have been in effect. The longer the amount of time that the rules are in effect, the more people who obtain permits. Not everyone who will eventually obtain a permit will apply for it immediately. With the large number of states that have only recently granted permits to people it is misleading to think that the current per-

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mit rate tells us the rate at which people in those states will be carrying concealed handguns even a few years from now.

Given how extremely law abiding these permit holders tend to be, it seems doubtful that most people carrying concealed handguns with permits were illegally carrying concealed handguns before the passage of the right-to-carry law. In many states, illegally carrying a concealed weapon would be the type of violation that would prevent people from ever even getting a permit. There is no evidence that these permit holders have violated this particular law. Yet even if as many as 10 percent of permit holders had previously been illegally carrying a concealed handgun, the coefficients from table 9.3 would still imply that for every 900 additional people with permits there are 0.3 fewer murders and 2.4 fewer rapes.

Finally, while the evidence linking the rate at which permits are issued and the drops in crime rates is important, it is only one portion of the evidence. For example, if there was no change in the number of people carrying concealed handguns, why did violent-crime rates in neighboring counties without the law increase at the same time that they were falling in neighboring counties with the right-to-carry law?

15 Shouldn't permit holders be required to have the same type of training as police officers?

Proponents of [right-to-carry] legislation contend that citizens will be adequately trained to handle firearms responsibly, but this is rarely true. Police departments require officers to go through a great deal of safety and proficiency training before issued a gun—followed by regular refresher courses and qualifications throughout the officer's career. Citizens armed under the provisions of non-discretionary carry laws are not so highly trained, and frequently not trained at all, thereby further increasing the risk of injury and death with a firearm. (From the Web page of Handgun Control, Inc., entitled "Will the Real John Lott Please Stand Up>")

Police officers face a much more difficult job than citizens with concealed handguns. An officer cannot be satisfied if the criminal runs away after he brandishes a gun. Instead, police must act offensively, which is much more dangerous. Citizens are rarely put in situations that require the skill of pursuing an attacker.

There are both costs and benefits to training. Yet the question is ultimately an empirical one. Training requirements improve the deterrence effect for concealed-handgun laws, but the effects are small. What I do find is that longer training periods reduce the number of people ob-

taining permits, and the net effect of increased training is clearly to reduce the deterrent effect of adopting right-to-carry laws.

16 Where does the academic debate stand?

In at least six articles published elsewhere, 10 academics found enough serious flaws in Lott's analysis to discount his findings completely. (David Hemenway, "Book Review of More Guns, Less Crime" New England Journal of Medicine, December 31, 1998)

To date, I have shared my data with academics at forty-two different universities and researchers at two different policy think tanks. Everyone who tried was able to replicate my findings, and only three papers using the data have been critical of my general approach. 106 A more recent fourth piece might be viewed as mildly critical. Yet the vast majority of researchers concur that concealed handguns deter crime, and perhaps just as important, not even the critics claim to have found that they cost lives or increase crime. In the above quote, Hemenway is referring to only three studies that have examined the data. The other three pieces (to arrive at his total of six) basically merely cite these three critical papers.

Some authors—such as William Bartley and Mark Cohen or Carlisle Moody—use the original data and claim to have "found strong support for the hypothesis that the right-to-carry laws are associated with a decrease in the trend in violent crimes" or that their alternative specifications "confirm and reinforce the basic findings." 107 David Olson and Michael Maltz check the findings by using newly available county-level data from the Supplementary Homicide Report data in place of the FBI's Uniform Crime Report and obtain virtually the same drop in murders after the passage of the right-to-carry laws. 108 Others—including Florenz Plassmann and Nicolaus Tideman—contend that the reduction in murder rates is almost twice as large as