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

Note: The only factors included are the presence of the law and/or year-specific effects. All these differences are statistically significant at least at the 1 percent level for a two-tailed t-test. To calculate these percentages, I used the approximation 100 [exp(coefficient) — 1).

17. The time-trend variable ranges from 1 to 16: for the first year in the sample, it equals 1; for the last year, it is 16.

18. Other differences arise in the other control variables, such as those relating to the portion of the population of a certain race, sex, and age. For example, the percent of black males in the population between 10 and 19 is no longer statistically significant.

19. If the task instead had been to determine the difference in crime rates when either all states or no states adopt the right-to-carry handgun laws, the case of all states adopting concealed-handgun laws would have produced 2,048 fewer murders, 6,618 fewer rapes, 129,114 fewer aggravated assaults, and 86,459 fewer robberies. Non-arson property crimes also would have fallen by 511,940.

20. Generally, aggregation is frowned on in statistics anyway, as it reduces the amount of information yielded by the data set. Lumping data together into a group cannot yield any new information that did not exist before; it only reduces the richness of the data.

21. Eric Rasmusen, "Stigma and Self-Fulfilling Expectations of Criminality," Journal of Law and Economics 39 (Oct. 1996): 519-44.

22. In January 1996, women held 118,728 permits in Washington and 17,930 permits in Oregon. The time-series data available for Oregon during the sample period even indicate that 17.6 percent of all permit holders were women in 1991. The Washington state data were obtained from Joe Vincent of the Department of Licensing Firearms Unit in Olym-pia, Washington. The Oregon state data were obtained from Mike Woodward of the Law Enforcement Data System, Department of State Police, Salem, Oregon. Recent evidence from Texas indicates that about 28 percent of applicants were women ("NRA poll: Salespeople No. 1 for Permit Applications" Dallas Morning News, Apr. 19, 1996, p. 32A).

23. For an interesting discussion of the benefits to women of owning guns, see Paxton Quigley, Armed and Female (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1989).

24. Unpublished information obtained by Kleck and Gertz in their 1995 National Self-Defense Survey implies that women were as likely as men to use handguns in self-defense in or near their homes (defined as in the yard, carport, apartment hall, street adjacent to home, detached garage, etc.), but that women were less than half as likely to use a gun in self-defense away from home. See Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun," Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 86 (Fall 1995): 249-87.

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25. Counties with real personal income of about $15,000 in real 1983 dollars experienced 8 percent drops in murder, while mean-income counties experienced a 5.5 percent drop.

26. Lori Montgomery, "More Blacks Say Guns Are Answer to Urban Violence," Houston Chronicle, July 9, 1995, p. Al. This article argues that while the opposition to guns in the black community is strong, more people are coming to understand the benefits of self-protection.

27. For an excellent overview of the role of race in gun control, see Robert J. Cottrol and Raymond T. Diamond, "The Second Amendment: Toward an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration," Georgetown Law Review 80 (Dec. 1991): 309.

28. See William Van Alstyne, "The Second Amendment Right to Arms," Duke Law Review 43 (Apr. 1994): 1236-55. In slave states prior to the Civil War, the freedoms guaranteed under the Bill of Rights were regularly restricted by states because of the fear that free reign might lead to an insurrection. As Akhil Reed Amar writes, "In a society that saw itself under siege after Nat Turner's rebellion, access to firearms had to be strictly restricted, especially to free blacks." See Akhil Reed Amar, "The Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment," Yale Law Journal 101 (Apr. 1992): 1193.

29. Associated Press Newswire, May 9, 1997, 4:37 p.m. EDT. As the Washington Times recently noted, this story "comes at an awkward time for the administration, since President Clinton has spent the last week or two berating Republicans for failing to include in anti-crime legislation a provision requiring that child safety locks be sold with guns to keep children from hurting themselves" (Editorial, "The Story of a Gun and a Kid," Washington Times, May 22, 1997, p. A18).

30. The conversation took place on March 18, 1997, though regrettably I have misplaced the note containing the representative's name.

31. John Carpenter, "Six Other States Have Same Law," Chicago Sun-Times, Mar. 11, 1997, p. 8.

32. John J. Dilulio, Jr., "The Question of Black Crime," The Public Interest 117 (Fall 1994): 3—24. Similar concerns about the inability of minorities to rely on the police was also expressed to me by Assemblyman Rod Wright (D—Los Angeles) during testimony before the California Assembly's Public Safety Committee on November 18, 1997.

33. One additional minor change is made in two of the earlier specifications. In order to avoid any artificial collinearity either between violent crime and robbery or between property crimes and burglary, violent crimes net of robbery and property crimes net of burglary are used as the endogenous variables when robbery or burglary are controlled for.

34. The Pearson correlation coefficient between robbery and the other crime categories ranges between .49 and .80, and all are so statistically significant that a negative correlation would only appear randomly once