More Guns Less Crime by John Jr (ebook reader macos .txt) 📗

example, a county of more than 850,000 people, only 10 now have permits." See also Cramer and Kopel, "New Wave of Concealed-Handgun Permit Laws," pp. 679—758.

20. For example, see Kleck and Patterson, "Impact of Gun Control and Gun-Ownership Levels on Violence Rates."

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white females in the 20-29 age range by 19 percent, while the difference for the United States as a whole is 3 percent. The same ratio for the 30—39 age range is 12 percent in Alaska and 1 percent nationally. Yet the greatest differences occur for blacks. In Alaska black males outnumber black females in the 20-29 age range by 40 percent, while in the rest of the United States the reverse is true, with black females outnumbering (nonincar-cerated) black males by 7 percent.

22. While no reliable data are available on this question, a couple of polls indicate that the number of otherwise law-abiding citizens who carry concealed handguns may be substantial. The results of a recent Oklahoma poll showed that up to 6 percent of Oklahoma residents already carry concealed handguns either on their persons or in their cars; see Michael Smith, "Many Permits to Go to Lawbreakers," Tulsa World, May 5, 1996, p. A15. The margin of error in the poll was 3.5 percent, which is substantial, given the small value with which this error is compared.

23. Sam Peltzman, "The Effects of Automobile Safety Regulation," Journal of Political Economy 83 (Aug. 1975): 677-725.

24. Steven Peterson, George Hoffer, and Edward Millner, "Are Drivers of Air-Bag-Equipped Cars More Aggressive? A Test of the Offsetting-Behavior Hypothesis," Journal of Law and Economics 38 (Oct. 1995): 251-64.

25. Kieran Murray, "NRA Taps into Anger of Mid-American Gunlovers," Reuters Newsw-ire, dateline Dallas, Apr. 21, 1996.

26. At least since the work of Isaac Ehrlich, economists have also realized that potential biases exist from using the offense rate as both the variable that one is seeking to explain and as the denominator in determining the arrest rate. To see this, suppose that mistakes are made in measuring the crime rate (and mistakes are certainly made) because of recording inaccuracies or simply because citizens may change the rates at which they report crime over time. Accidentally recording a crime rate that is too high will result in our recording an arrest rate that is too low, since the arrest rate is the total number of arrests divided by the total number of crimes. The converse is also true: When too low a crime rate is recorded, the arrest rate that we observe will be too high. Obviously, this problem will make it appear that a negative relationship exists between arrest rates and crime even if no relationship exists. There is also the concern that increasing crime rates may lower arrest rates if the same resources are being asked to do more work. See Isaac Ehrlich, "Participation in Illegitimate Activities: A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation ," Journal of Political Economy 81 (1973): 548-53.

CHAPTER THREE

1. The 1988 poll's margin of error was 1.1 percent, while that of the 1996 poll was 2.2 percent.

2. In order to obtain the rate at which people in the general population owned guns, I weighted the respondents' answers to give less weight to groups that were overrepre-sented among voters compared to their share in the overall population, and to give greater weight to those groups that were underrepresented. Twenty-four categories of personal characteristics were used to compute these weightings: white males and females, and black males and females, aged 18—29; neither black nor white males and females 18—29; white males and females, and black males and females 30—44; neither black nor white males and females 30—44; white males and females, and black males and females 45—59; neither black nor white males and females 45-59; white males and females, and black males and females over 59; neither black nor white males and females over 59.

3. This argument has been made explicitly in the press many times. See, for example, Scott Baldauf, "As Crime Shrinks, Security Is Still Growth Industry," Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 2, 1996, p. 1.

276 / NOTES TO PAGES 36-40

4. Alix M. Freedman, "Tinier, Deadlier Pocket Pistols Are in Vogue," Wall Street Journal, Sept. 12, 1996, P. Bl.

5. The primary concern here is that letting people check those parts of a list that apply will result in fewer positive responses than asking people to answer individual questions about each item. As one way of checking the importance of this concern, I examined whether other questions that changed in a similar way between the two polls experienced a change in the same direction as that shown for gun ownership. The two questions that I looked at—regarding marriage and whether children less than 18 lived with the respondent—moved in the opposite direction. Relatively more people indicated these responses in the 1988 poll when the questions were presented in a list than did so when they were presented with separate questions about these characteristics. I have also done extensive research using other questions involving marriage and children under 18 living with the respondent that were part of a "check as many as apply" question. That research provides extremely strong evidence that these questions were answered consistently be-' tween 1988 and 1996. See John R. Lott, Jr. and Larry W. Kenny, "How Dramatically Did Women's Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?" University of Chicago School of Law working paper (1997). The relative differences in gun ownership across groups is also consistent with recent work using other polls by Edward Glaeser and Spencer Glendon, "Who Owns Guns?" American Economic Review 88 (May 1998).

The empirical work that will be done later will allow us to adjust for the changes