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

Gunshot Victims' Bills," Chicago Sun-Times, Aug. 4, 1999, p. 30.

105. Another survey by gun-control advocates claims that "four million legal handgun owners sometimes carried guns for protection 'in connection with work.' Two-thirds of those who carried handguns said they kept them in their vehicles, while the others

said they sometimes carried them The researchers said about 56 percent of those who

carried handguns outside of work did so fewer than 30 days per year, while 22 percent said they rarely left home without a gun" (Will Hacker, "Majority of Owners Cite Security Concerns " South Bend Tribune, June 29, 1997, p. A6).

106. Unlike the critical papers by Black and Nagin as well as Ludwig, the paper by Dezhbakhsh and Rubin also critically examined my data, but I did not think it would be of general enough interest to discuss in the text (Dezhbakhsh and Rubin, "Lives Saved or Lives Lost?" pp. 468-74). What they do is run a regression over only those observations in which the right-to-carry law is in effect; they then take this regression and plug in

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those observations during 1992 for which the right-to-carry laws are not in effect. This last step generates what they claim are predicted values for what the crime rates would be in those counties without the laws if they had the laws. They then compare what the actual crime rates were in the counties without the laws with their predicted crime rates and take the difference. If the actual crime rate is greater than the predicted, they claim that this shows that the law would have lowered the crime rate. If the actual crime rate is less than the predicted value, they claim that this shows the law would have raised the crime rate.

This approach makes no sense to me. It is throwing out all the information on the before-and-after change in crime rates that occurs when states change their laws. The method also eliminates the role of fixed effects. All the predicted crime rates in the counties without right-to-carry laws in 1992 are assumed to have the same intercept value from the regression, since there is no county dummy to use in making the predicted value. If the left-out county that is represented by the intercept happens to have a low crime rate, it will make the right-to-carry laws look good. If the reverse is true, the right-to-carry laws will look as if the law is increasing the crime rate. On average, randomly picking one will produce no systematic effect and the predicted values will lie on both sides of the actual crime rates.

107. William Bartley and Mark Cohen, "The Effect of Concealed Weapons Laws: An Extreme Bound Analysis," Economic Inquiry 36 (Apr. 1998): 259. See also William Alan Bartley, "Will Rationing Guns Reduce Crime?" Economics Letters 62 (1999): 241-43; and Carlisle E. Moody, "Testing for the Effects of Concealed Weapons Laws: Specification Errors and Robustness," William and Mary College, Department of Economics, working paper, December 1999, p. 13.

108. David Olson and Michael Maltz, "Magic Bullets, Deterrence, and Gun Laws," Loyola University Chicago working paper, December 1999.

109. Florenz Plassman and T. Nicolaus Tideman, "Does the Right to Carry Concealed Handguns Deter Countable Crimes? Only a Count Analysis Can Say," State University of New York at Binghampton working paper, May 19,1999, p. 22. See also Glenn W Harrison, David Kennison, and Katherine M. Macedon, "Legal Guarantee of the Right to Bear Arms: Can It Be Justified Empirically?" University of South Carolina working paper, December 1999.

110. Florenz Plassman and T. Nicholaus Tideman, "Geographical and Temporal Variation in the Effects of Right-to-Carry Laws on Crime," Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University working paper, November 17, 1999. Both of Plassman and Tideman's papers use a Poisson process to handle the low number of expected crimes per county observation and this allows them to solve the problem of missing observations that has plagued other papers using this data.

111. William F. Shughart n, "More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws: Review," pp. 978—80; and Benson, "Review of More Guns, Less Crime," pp. 309—13.

112. Benson, "Review of More Guns, Less Crime" p. 309.

113. These reviews during 1998 have appeared in the Dallas Morning News (Stan Liebo-witz at the University of Texas at Dallas), American Enterprise (Robert Cottrol at George Washington University), the Weekly Standard (Nelson Lund at George Mason University Law School), National Review (John O. McGinnis at Cardozo School of Law), and Reason Magazine (Dan Polsby at Northwestern University).

114. Janelle Hartman, "Assailant Gets Shot by Victim," Eugene (OR) Register Guard, Mar. 11, 1998, p. 1.

115. Nicole Marshall, "Concealed Gun Carrier Subdues Suspect: Man Reportedly Had Snatched Toddler," Tulsa World, Jan. 31, 1998.

116. Frank J. Murray, "Arizona Gun Owner's Courage Led to Scary Arrests," Washington Times, May 2, 1999, p. C8.

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117. Laurie Mason, "Customer Stops Would-Be Robber," Bucks County Courier Times, Dec. 13, 1998, p. 7C.

118. Edward W. Lempinen, "Robber Shot Dead," Newsday, Aug. 3, 1999, p. A3; "Concealed Carry Permit Pays Off," Local Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky TV 9 Evening News, Aug. 19, 1999; Tom Jackman and Maria Glod, "A Glimmer of Hope, Then Violent Death," Washington Post, June 21, 1999, p. Bl; "Carjacking Suspect Critically Wounded," Arizona Republic, June 5, 1999, p. B2; and Joe Brogan, "Rent Collector Shoots, Kills Riviera Robber," Palm Beach Post, Jan. 14, 1999, p. Bl.

A case from the end of 1998 that deserves some mention involved an eighty-one-year-old Chicago native who defended himself