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

in the reported level of gun ownership that might result from the change in this question.

6. I appreciate Tom Smith's taking the time to talk to me about these issues on May 30, 1997.

7. Gun owners within each of the twenty-four categories listed in note 2 above may have particular characteristics that cause them to vote at rates that differ from the rates at which other people vote. One would hope that some of that difference would be accounted for in the detailed demographic characteristics, but there is a good chance that this may not occur. Several attempts were made to see how large this effect might be by asking, for example, whether gun owners were more or less likely not to have voted in previous elections. This question has also been broken down to account for those who are old enough to have voted previously. For 1988, the difference in gun ownership between those who were voting for the first time and those who had voted previously was 3 percent (23.2 percent of those voting for the first time and 26.2 percent of those who were not owned guns). Limiting this question to people who were 30 years of age or older produced an even smaller difference: 28.9 percent of first-time voters owned guns versus 27.5 percent of those who had voted previously. Similarly, for the question of whether voters in 1988 had also voted in 1984, the difference was also 3 percent (23 percent of those who did not vote in 1984 and 26.4 percent of those who did owned guns).

Because most people voted, a 13 percent increase in the proportion of the general population owning guns would require an even greater drop in gun ownership among those who didn't vote in order for gun ownership to have remained constant. For some groups, such as women, for whom gun ownership among voters increased by over 70 percent, the increase is so large and the percent of women voting so high that an 80 percent drop in gun ownership among nonvoting women would have been required for gun ownership among women to have remained constant.

8. Indeed, making this adjustment produces a number that is much closer to that found in other polls of the general population, such as the National Opinion Research Center's 1996 National Gun-Policy Survey, which finds that 42 percent of the general adult population owns guns.

9. The previous peak in murder rates occurred at the end of Prohibition in the early 1930s, with the peak of 9.7 murders per 100,000 people being reached in 1933. The 1996 murder rate of 7.3 murders per 100,000 people seems tame by comparison. Indeed many people, such as Milton Friedman, have argued that much of the change in murder rates

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over time has been driven by the country's war on drugs and its earlier war on alcohol. Even the gradual increase in murder rates leading up to the Nineteenth Amendment's adoption in 1991 corresponds with passage of individual state laws. Kansas, Maine, and North Dakota enacted prohibition laws between 1880 and 1890. Five states enacted prohibition in 1907-1909, followed by twelve more between 1912 and 1915 and another twelve between 1916 and 1918. Obviously, all this points to the importance of other factors in the murder rate, and that is part of the reason why I include a measure of drug prices in my estimates to explain why crime rates change over time. See Ernest H. Cherrington, The Evolution of Prohibition in the United States of America (Westerville, OH: Tern-Press, 1920); Edward B. Dunford, The History of the Temperance Movement (Washington, DC: Tern-Press, 1943); D. Leigh Colvin, Prohibition in the United States, (New York: George H. Doran, 1926); as well as state statutes (as a check).

10. While I will follow Cramer and Kopel's definition of what constitutes a "shall-issue" or a "do-issue" state (see "'Shall Issue': The New Wave of Concealed-Handgun Permit Laws," Tennessee Law Review 62 [Spring 1995]), one commentator has suggested that it is not appropriate to include Maine in these categories (Stephen P. Teret, "Critical Comments on a Paper by Lott and Mustard," School of Hygiene and Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, mimeo, Aug. 7, 1996). Neither defining Maine so that the "shall-issue" dummy equals zero nor removing Maine from the data set alters the findings shown in this book.

11. While the intent of the 1988 legislation in Virginia was clearly to institute a "shall-issue" law, the law was not equally implemented in all counties in the state. To deal with this problem, I reran the regressions reported in this paper with the "shall-issue" dummy equal to both 1 and 0 for Virginia.

12. I rely on Cramer and Kopel for this list of states. Some states, known as "do-issue" states, are also included in Cramer and Kopel's list of "shall-issue" states, though these authors argue that for all practical purposes these two groups of states are identical. See Cramer and Kopel, "New Wave of Concealed-Handgun Permit Laws," pp. 679—91.

13. The Oregon counties providing permit data were Benton, Clackamas, Columbia, Coos, Curry, Deschutes, Douglas, Gilliam, Hood River, Jackson, Jefferson, Josephine, Klamath, Lane, Lincoln, Linn, Malheur, Marion, Morrow, Multnomah, Polk, Tillamook, Umatilla, Washington and Yamhill.

14. In economics jargon I would say that I am interacting the sentence length with year-dummy variables.

15. These variables are referred to as county fixed-effects, where a separate dummy variable is set equal to 1 for each individual county.

16. See appendix 4 for the list and summary statistics.

17. For example, see James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein, Crime and Human Nature (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), pp. 126-47.

18. However, the effect of an unusually large percentage of young males in the population may be mitigated