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

earlier research paper because it was "quite relevant" to the debate over concealed handguns: it illustrates both the possibility of deterrence and the fears about the possible disasters that such laws could lead to.

Still other recent discussions in medical journals continue claiming that the nondis-cretionary concealed-handgun laws for "several counties ... were misclassified" and that the National Academy of Sciences deemed it inappropriate to account for arrest rates when researchers tried to explain changes in crime (see Arthur Kellermann and Sheryl Heron, "Firearms and Family Violence," Emergency Medicine Clinics of North America, Aug. 1999, pp. 699—708). Of course, responses 4 and 9 on pages 132-33 and 142 in this book addressed the first concern and page 18 discussed the second one.

69. http://www.handguncontrol.org/gunowner/statflaw.htm.

70. Doug Weil, Handgun Control's research director, provided the only response that I know of to my research on the Brady law by claiming that "Since John's data does not cover the years following implementation of the Brady Act, it's hard to know how he can claim to have studied the impact of the Brady law on crime rates or criminal access to guns" ("More Guns, Less Crime?: A Debate between John Lott, Author of More Guns, Less Crime, and Douglas Weil, Research Director of Handgun Control, Inc.," an online debate sponsored by Time magazine, transcript from July 1, 1998.) In fact, my book examined data up through 1994, the first year that the Brady law was in effect.

71. Romesh Ratnesar, "Should You Carry A Gun? A New Study Argues for Concealed Waspons," Time, July 6, 1998, p. 48.

72. I responded by saying that he was doing more than simply reporting these statements as claims when he used phrases like "Lott dropped" or "the book does not account." More importantly, readers were likely to believe that he had looked at the material and that he would not print something, even if the critics claimed it was true, unless it was true. Again, he emphasized that his role was that of a reporter and not to take sides in the debate.

NOTES TO PAGE207/301

I had called Romesh in part to tell him that I planned to send in a letter clarifying these points, and Time magazine did print a letter. Undoubtedly he played some role in guaranteeing that the letter was published, but it seems doubtful that the letter carried the same weight as a statement by the reporter about whether he could verify if the claims made against me were true. The letter in Time magazine was printed in the Aug. 3, 1998, issue under the heading "More about Concealed Weapons." It read:

While your piece "Should You Carry a Gun?" [July 6] was generally favorable toward my new book, More Guns, Less Crime, it contained seriously misleading statements. Despite accusations by some critics, my study on the effect that carrying concealed weapons has on crime absolutely did not ignore "counties that had no reported murders or assaults for a given year." In contrast to the tiny samples in previous work by others, I used data on all the counties in the U.S. that were available when I did the study on the years from 1977 to 1994. It is likewise false that I did "not account for fluctuating factors like poverty levels and police techniques." Among the factors I included in the analysis were poverty, income, unemployment, arrest and conviction rates, the number of police officers and police expenditures per capita, as well as the impact that the prevention of less serious crimes has on more serious ones.

73. Ivins, "More Guns, Less Crime? Are You Sure?"

74. Tom Teepen, "A Modest Proposal: Let's Arm the Teachers," Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Sunday, May 17, 1998, p. 2G.

75. The following letter of mine appeared in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, May 24, 1998, p. 6B:

Tom Teepen's column "A modest proposal: Let's arm the teachers," Perspective, May 17), an attack on my new book "More Guns, Less Crime" (University of Chicago Press), contained misleading information. He claimed that "Lott can't fairly compare 1988 and 1996 exit polls on gun ownership, as he does, because the questions were asked differently." Yet on pages 36—37 in my book, I point out this fact and discuss in detail what impact this has on estimates of changing gun ownership.

Citing a paper in the Journal of Legal Studies, Teepen claimed that I make a "fundamental gaffe" by failing to consider other anti-crime variables. My book provides the first systematic national evidence and examines the crime, accidental gun death, and suicide rates for all 3,054 counties in the United States by year from 1977 to 1994. No other study on crime has attempted to account for anywhere near as many different factors that could have affected crime rates over time. Unlike the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's claim that homes with guns were "more likely to experience suicide," or have "a member of the family killed by another member or by an acquaintance," I did not focus on data from only one or a few cities for only one year. There is no evidence that these claims are correct.

Obviously, bad things can happen with guns, but guns also prevent bad things from happening to people. The evidence in my book indicates that many more lives are saved than lost from gun ownership.

76. An editor at the Fort Worth Star-Telegraph, Bob Davis, was very helpful, and he took the time to read my book to evaluate whether a mistake had been made. He printed a response by me in his newspaper, and he asked Creators Syndicate, which distributes Ms. Ivins's commentary, to make the response available to other newspapers around the country that carried Ms.