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

Figure 3.6. State concealed-handgun laws as of 1996

Table 3.2 Crime rates in states and the District of Columbia that do and do not allow the carrying of concealed handguns (1992)

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The difference is quite striking: violent crimes are 81 percent higher in states without nondiscretionary laws. For murder, states that ban the concealed carrying of guns have murder rates 127 percent higher than states with the most liberal concealed-carry laws. For property crimes, the difference is much smaller: 24 percent. States with nondiscretionary laws have less crime, but the primary difference appears in terms of violent crimes.

Since the primary data that we will focus on are at the county level, we are asking whether crime rates change in counties whose states adopt nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws. We are also asking whether the crime rates change relative to other changes in counties located in states without such laws. Using a reference library (Lexis/Nexis) that contains an extensive collection of news stories and state laws, I conducted a search to determine the exact dates on which these laws took effect. In the states that adopted the laws during the year, the effects for their counties were scaled to equal that portion of the year during which the laws were in effect. Because of delays in implementing the laws even after they went into effect, I defined counties in states with nondiscretionary laws as being under the these laws beginning with the first full year for which the law was in effect. While all the tables shown in this book use the second measure, both measures produced similar results.

The number of arrests and offenses for each type of crime in every county from 1977 to 1992 was provided by the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports; in addition, however, I contacted the state department of corrections, attorney general, secretary of state, and state police offices in every state in an effort to compile data on conviction rates, sentence lengths, and concealed-weapons permits by county. The Bureau of Justice Statistics also released a list of contacts in every state that might provide state-level criminal justice data. Unfortunately, county data on the total number of outstanding concealed-carry pistol permits were available only for Arizona, California, Florida, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington, and time-series county data before and after a change in the law were only available for Arizona (1994-96), Oregon (1990-92), and Pennsylvania (1986—92). Since the Oregon nondiscretionary law was passed in 1990, I sought data on the number of permits in 1989 by calling up every county sheriff in Oregon, and 25 of the 36 counties provided that information. (The remaining counties stated that records had not been kept.) 13 For Oregon, data on county-level conviction rates and sentence lengths were also available from 1977 to 1992.

One difficulty with the sentence-length data is that Oregon passed a sentencing-reform act that took effect in November 1989 and required criminals to serve 85 percent of their sentences; thus, judges may have

correspondingly altered their sentencing practices. This change was phased in over time because the law only applied to crimes committed after it went into effect in 1989. In addition, the Oregon system did not keep complete records prior to 1987, and their completeness decreased as one looked further into the past. One solution to both of these problems is to allow the sentence-length variable to have different effects in each year. 14 A similar problem exists for Arizona, which adopted a truth-in-sentencing reform in the fall of 1994. We must note, finally, that Arizona differs from Oregon and Pennsylvania in that it already allowed handguns to be carried openly before passing its concealed-handgun law; thus, one might expect to find a somewhat smaller response to adopting a concealed-handgun law.

In addition to using separate variables to measure the average crime rate in each county, 15 1 collected data from the Bureau of the Census to try to control for other demographic characteristics that might influence the crime rate. These data included information on the population density per square mile, total county population, and detailed information on the racial and age breakdown of the county (percent of population by each racial group and by sex between 10 and 19 years of age, between 20 and 29, between 30 and 39, between 40 and 49, between 50 and 64, and 65 and over). 16 While a large literature discusses the likelihood that younger males will engage in crime, 17 controlling for these other categories allows us to account for the groups considered most vulnerable (for example, females in the case of rape). 18 Recent evidence reported by Glaeser and Sacerdote confirms the higher crime rates experienced in cities and examines the effects on these rates of social and family influences as well as the changing pecuniary benefits from crime; 19 the present study, however, is the first to explicitly control for population density (see appendix 3 for a more complete discussion of the data).

An additional set of income data was also used. These included real per-capita personal income, real per-capita unemployment insurance payments, real per-capita income-maintenance payments, and real per-capita retirement payments per person over 65 years of age. 20 Unemployment insurance and income-maintenance payments from the Commerce Department's Regional Economic Information System (REIS) data set were included in an attempt to provide annual, county-level measures of unemployment and the distribution of income.

Finally, I recognize that other legal changes regarding how guns are used and when they can be obtained can alter the levels of crime. For example, penalties involving improper gun use might also have been changing simultaneously with changes in the requirements for obtaining permits to carry concealed handguns. In order to see whether such

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changes might confound my ability to infer the causes of any observed changes