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

81 (1973): 548—51. Except for the political variables, my specification accords fairly closely with at least the spirit of Ehrlich's specification,

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though some of my variables, like the demographic breakdowns, are much more detailed, and I have a few other measures that were not available to him.

2. See also Robert E. McCormick and Robert Tollison, "Crime on the Court," Journal of Political Economy 92 (Apr. 1984): 223-35, for a novel article testing the endogeneity of the "arrest rate" in the context of basketball penalties.

3. These last two variables are measured at the state level.

4. Phil Cook suggested this addition to me. In a sense, this is similar to Ehrlich's specification, except that the current crime rate is broken down into its lagged value and the change between the current and previous periods. See Ehrlich, "Participation in Illegitimate Activities," p. 557.

5. The natural logs of the rates for violent crime and property crime were used.

6. These estimates are known as two-stage least squares.

7. Ehrlich raises the concern that the types of two-stage, least-squares estimates discussed above might still be affected by spurious correlation if the measurement errors for the crime rate were serially correlated over time. To account for this, I reestimated the first-stage regressions predicting the arrest rate without the lagged crime rate, which made the estimated results for the nondiscretionary law dummy even more negative and more statistically significant than those already shown. See Ehrlich, "Participation in Illegitimate Activities," p. 552 n. 46.

8. Still another approach would be to estimate what are known as Tobit regressions, but unfortunately no statistical package is available that allows me both to control for all the different county dummy variables and to use the Tobit procedure.

CHAPTER SEVEN

1. The Violence Policy Center grew out of the National Coalition to Ban Handguns.

2. Douglas Weil, the research director for Handgun Control, Inc., has publicly disagreed with the claim that most gun-control advocates initially refused to comment on my study. In a letter to the Washington Times, Weil wrote,

The Washington Times editorial ("Armed and Safer," Aug. 14) is misinformed and misguided. The Times falsely claims that gun-control proponents "initially refused to read" John Lott's and David Mustard's study of the impact of laws regarding the right to carry concealed guns, and that I attacked the researchers' motivations rather than challenge the study "on the merits." This charge is untrue.

One look at the study would prove the Times wrong. On the title page of the study, several pro-gun-control researchers are credited for their comments "on the merits" of the study. Included in this list are David McDowall, a criminologist at the University of Maryland; Philip Cook, an economist at Duke University; and myself, research director for the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence.

Upon reviewing the study, I found Mr. Lott's methodology to be seriously flawed. I told Mr. Lott that his study did not adequately control for the whole range of ways that state and local governments attempt to lower the crime rate. In Oregon, for example, the same legislation that made it easier to carry a concealed handgun included one of the toughest new handgun-purchase laws in the country—a 15-day waiting period and fingerprint-background check on all purchases. ...

I gladly shared my critique of this study with Mr. Lott and will now reiterate it here; as someone fully credentialed to evaluate Mr. Lott's and Mr. Mustard's work, I would have recommended that the paper be rejected. (See Douglas Weil, "A Few Thoughts on the Study of Handgun Violence and Gun Control," Washington Times, Aug. 22, 1996, p. A16.)

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While it is true that I thanked Mr. Weil in my paper for a comment that he made, his single comment was nothing like what his letter to the Times claimed. Before he explained his concerns to the press, he and I had no discussions about whether I had controlled for "ways that state and local governments attempt to lower the crime rate," possibly because my study not only controls for arrest and conviction rates, prison sentences, the number of police officers and police payroll, but also waiting periods and criminal penalties for using a gun in the commission of a crime.

Mr. Weil's sole comment to me came after two previous telephone calls over a month and a half in which Mr. Weil had said that he was too busy to give me any comments. His sole comment on August 1 was that he was upset that I had cited a study by a professor, Gary Kleck, with whom Weil disagreed. I attempted to meet this unusual but minor criticism by rewriting the relevant sentence on the first page in a further attempt to dispassionately state the alternative hypotheses.

Mr. Weil's claims are particularly difficult to understand in light of a conversation that I had with him on August 5. After hearing him discuss my paper on the news, I called him to say how surprised I was to hear about his telling the press that the paper was "fundamentally flawed" when the only comment that he had given me was on the reference to Kleck. Mr. Weil then immediately demanded to know whether it was true that I had thanked him for giving comments on the paper. He had heard from people in the news media who had seen a draft with his name listed among those thanked. (On August 1,1 had added his name to the list of people who had given comments, and when the news of the paper suddenly broke on August 2 with the story in USA Today, it was this new version that had been faxed to the news media.) He wanted