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

University of Michigan Law Review 82 (1983): 204—68; William Van Alstyne, "The Second Amendment Right to Arms," Duke Law Review 43 (Apr. 1994): 1236—55; and Sanford Levinson, "The Embarrassing Second Amendment," Yale Law Journal 99 (Dec. 1989): 637-89. Legal scholars seem to be in general agreement on the way the Second Amendment's use of the word militia is so completely misinterpreted in current discussions of what the amendment means. The only twentieth-century case in which the Supreme Court directly interpreted the Second Amendment was United States v. Miller, 307 US 174 (1939). The court was quite clear that historical sources "showed plainly enough that the Militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense." The court accepted "the common view ... that adequate defense of the country and laws could be secured through the Militia—citizens primarily, soldiers on occasion."

The framers of the Constitution were also very clear on this issue. James Madison wrote in the Federalist papers that if a standing army threatened citizens' liberties, it would be opposed by "a militia amounting to near a half-million citizens with arms in their hands" ; see Clinton Rossiter, ed., The Federalist no. 46 (1961): 299. An excellent discussion of this and related issues is presented by David L. Franklin and Heather L. O'Farrell in their University of Chicago Moot Court brief on Printz and Mack v United States, Apr. 18, 1997.

CHAPTERNINE

1. Editorial, "Why Sharon Laid Down Her Arms," New York Post, Aug. 19, 1999, p. 8.

2. Ruth Teichroeb, "Hearing Today for Boy Expelled over Squirt Gun," Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Sept. 22, 1998, p. Bl. To show how extreme these cases have gotten, young students have been suspended even for taking toenail clippers to school (Carolyn Bower, "Huffman School Suspends Student for Possessing Toenail Clippers," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sept. 28, 1999).

3. This statement was in response to the following question: "Now there does not seem to be that much that this kind of program works to reduce crime, in fact, no evidence, as far as I can tell, at all. How do you respond to that?" (Thalia Assuras, "Andrew Cuomo, Secretary of HUC, Explains President Clinton's Gun Buyback Program," CBS's This Morning, Sept. 9, 1999.

4. "Special Report: America under the Gun: What Must Be Done," Newsweek, Aug. 23, 1999.

5. Brian Rooney and Ted Koppel, "Guns—an American Way of Life and/or Death," ABC's Nightline, Aug. 10, 1999.

6. These reactions are hardly limited to the United States. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan proposes that nations "adopt gun control laws including a prohibition of unrestricted trade and private ownership of small arms" ("UN Targets Small Arms," BBC News, Sept. 25, 1999, 0723 GMT).

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and South Carolina enacted "shall-issue" laws. However, these did not go into effect until extremely late in the year. Louisiana did not even start issuing applications until the end of September (Lisa Roland, "Applications for Concealed Handgun Permits to Be Issued This Week," Gannett News Service, Sept. 20, 1999). In Kentucky, permits were also not issued until the very end of the year (Michael Quinlan, "Concealed Guns: Permits Will Take Time, Law Will Go into Effect Tomorrow," Louisville Courier-Journal, Sept. 30, 1996, p. Al). South Carolina's law went into effect August 22,1996, but its permitting process also took a couple of months to start actually issuing permits (Kathy Steele, "Women with Guns on Rise," Augusta (GA) Chronicle, Apr. 11, 1997, p. B2).

8. While I believe the much more interesting question is how crime rates change before and after the adoption of right-to-carry laws, the states with right-to-carry laws in effect for at least one year in 1996 had an average violent crime rate of 446.6 per 100,000 people, while the states with more restrictive "may-issue" rules had a violent crime rate of 592.6, and states banning concealed handguns a rate of 789.7. The main reason for not focusing on these numbers is simply that it ignores whether these states tended to be the lowest-crime-rate states even before they adopted right-to-carry laws. One method that partially accounts for this concern is to examine the cross-sectional data using the demographic, poverty, income, and other variables that have been employed throughout the book. After controlling for these other factors, the presence of a right-to-carry law implies a violent crime rate 15 percent lower than the absence of a law implies, and the effect is quite statistically significant, with a t-statistic that is significant at better than the .01 percent level for a two-tailed t-test.

9. David Hemenway, "Book Review of More Guns, Less Crime? New England Journal of Medicine, Dec. 31, 1998, pp. 2029-30.

10. Jens Ludwig, "Concealed-Gun-Carrying Law and Violent Crime: Evidence from State Panel Data," International Review of Law and Economics 18 (Sept. 1998): 239-54.

11. The Northeast includes Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont; the South includes Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia; the Midwest includes Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, West Virginia, and Wisconsin; the Rocky Mountains include Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming; and the Pacific states include Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington.

12. Because of the criticism that it is unrealistic to use a simple dummy variable, I have decided to focus from the beginning on the more realistic approach that examines the before- and after-law trends in crime rates.

13. The results using the old specifications also continue to