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

Ivins's column. Unfortunately, despite repeated promises by Creators to do so, they never followed through on this.

302 / NOTESTO PAGES 207-214

Even John Lott admits that 58 percent of homicides are committed either by family members or friends and acquaintances, not criminals. (Richard Scribner, [director of the Injury Control Research Center], "More Guns Don't Mean a Safer Society," New Orleans Times-Picayune, Apr. 28, 1999, p. B6)

Dr. Lott's own analysis accounts for only about 10 percent of why some crime rates have fallen. We need to explain the other 90 percent before concluding that the "best" social policy is to carry more handguns. (Shela Van Ness, "More Guns, Less Crime? This Isn't Just a 'Good Guy' vs. 'Bad Guy' Issue," Chattanooga Times / Chattanooga Free Press, May 9, 1999, p. HI)

For the first point, not only do I not "admit" this, but my book points out that this claim is extremely misleading because the term "acquaintances" primarily includes rival gang members killing each other or drug buyers and drug sellers killing each other. As to the second point, the estimates shown in this book explain about 80—95 percent of the variation in crime rates.

78. The Chronicle of Higher Education noted that the opposition to my book also showed up in the University of Chicago Press, this book's publisher. The Chronicle reported that "The book also caused a mini-revolt at Chicago, where salespeople initially blanched at the prospect of pitching it to bookstores. Some cited personal views about guns; others thought that the book would alienate booksellers" (Christopher Shea, '"More Guns, Less Crime': A Scholar's Thesis Inflames Debate over Weapons Control," Chronicle of Higher Education, June 5, 1998, p. AH).

79. In this case, the dummy must be interpreted as whether the law raised or lowered the crime rate as quickly as the quadratic time trend would predict.

80. This example is taken from David D. Friedman's Web site, www.best.com/~ddfr/ Lott_v_Teret/Lott_Mustard_Controversy.html.

81. Virtually identical complaints have been posted on the Handgun Control, Inc., Web site, where Handgun Control writes: "To this day, John Lott has failed to provide any statistical evidence of his own that counters Black and Nagin's finding that Lott's conclusions are inappropriately attributed to changes in concealed-carry laws. Until Lott can do this, it is inappropriate for him to continue to claim that allowing more people to carry concealed handguns causes a drop in crime."

82. Dan A. Black and Daniel S. Nagin, "Do Right-to-Carry Laws Deter Violent Crime?" Journal of Legal Studies 27 (Jan. 1998): p. 213.

83. What is mystifying to me is how others have also continued to make this claim. Hashem Dezbakhsh and Paul H. Rubin claim that "We believe that Lott and Mustard's findings are suspect, mainly because of the way they parameterize and measure the effect of permissive handgun laws on crime. They model the effect as a shift in the intercept of the linear crime equation they estimate at the county level. This approach is predicated on two assumptions: (i) all behavioral (response) parameters of this equation (slope coefficients) are fixed (unaffected by the law), and (ii) the effect of the law on crime is identical across counties" (Hashem Dezbakhsh and Paul H. Rubin, "Lives Saved or Lives Lost? The Effects of Concealed-Handgun Laws on Crime," American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, May 1998, p. 468).

84. http://www.best.com/~ddfr/Lott_vJTeret/Friedman_on_B_and__N.html. A great deal of debate about my research and other gun-related research takes place on the Internet in discussion groups such as talk.politics.guns or on Web sites such as David Friedman's, which allows for a very detailed discussion of the issues. The give and take also allows people to ferret out the weaknesses and strengths of different arguments.

85. Benson, "Review of More Guns, Less Crime," p. 312.

86. Ayres and Donohue mention in a footnote that "Lott was not unaware of the possibility that crack influenced the level of crime and some regressions in the book control for the price data for cocaine (p. 201, fh. 8), but the quantity of crack sold in

NOTES TO PAGES 216-218/303

discrete geographic markets instead of its national price would be much more probative." Even though I had given them the price data, they apparently had not had time to examine it and realize that it was county-level data.

While simply using the price does not allow one to perfectly disentangle local differences in demand and supply, arbitrage basically assures that, except for short periods of time, the differences in prices between these local markets will equal differences in selling costs. If the total cost of selling cocaine were the same in two different cities, any price differentials resulting from sudden shifts in demand would cause distributors to send cocaine to the city with the higher price until the price had fallen enough that the prices between the two cities were equal. Distributors could even remove cocaine from the low-price city and move it to where it could obtain a higher price. Sellers in a city could also hold inventories and not sell their cocaine during periods with unusually low demand. To the extent that it is costly to move drugs instantly between different cities or to store drugs, any price differentials in the short run can be due to demand shifts, but since we are dealing with a period of a year, it seems difficult to believe that any non-cost-based price differentials will not be arbitraged away.

The bottom line is that if price differentials exist for long periods of time (and we would pick up precisely these differences by using average yearly prices), any price differentials will be cost based. Now cost differences can arise for many reasons (e.g., differences in law enforcement, wage differentials for workers,