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

question of whether the possible presence of concealed handguns causes criminals to prefer committing crimes against people they know, since presumably they would be more likely to know if an acquaintance carried a concealed handgun. The principal relationship between age and concealed handguns is that the concealed weapon deters crime against adults more than against young people—because only adults can legally carry concealed handguns—but the effect is statistically insignificant. 2 Some of the benefits from allowing adults to carry concealed handguns may be conferred on younger people whom these adults protect. In addition, when criminals who attack adults leave states that pass concealed-handgun laws, there might also be fewer criminals left to attack the children. The earlier evidence from figures 4.10—4.13 indicates that concealed-handgun laws actually drive criminals away, leaving fewer criminals to attack either adults or those under eighteen. Younger people may also benefit from concealed-carry laws simply because criminals cannot always easily determine who is eligible to carry a concealed handgun. Attackers may find seventeen-year-olds difficult to distinguish from eighteen-year-olds.

Table 5.2 Changes in characteristics of murder victims: annual, state-level data from the Uniform Crime Reports, Supplementary Homicide Reports, from 1977 to 1992

Percent change in various endogenous variables for changes in explanatory variables

By victim's sex

By victim's race By victim's relationship to offender

Percent of victims

where the Percent of

offender is victims Percent of Percent

Percent of Percent of Percent ofPercent of known to where the victims victims

Change in Percent of Percent of victims, victims victims victims victim but offender is where the where the

explanatory Male Female sex that are that are that are is not in in the offender is relationship

variable Victims Victims unknownwhite black Hispanicfamily family a stranger is unknown

Nondiscretionary law adopted

Arrest rate for murder increased by 100 percentage points

0.39

0.068

-0.44

-0.14

0.05

0.07

0.01

-2.02**

0.70

1.32*

-0.87

0.33

2.58

1.74*

-0.25

-1.45*

0.54

0.79

-2.*

-1.08

To interpret this table, the first coefficient (0.39) implies that the percent of male victims increases by 0.39 percentage points if a state adopts a nondiscretionary concealed-handgun law. While not all the coefficient estimates are reported, all the control variables are the same as those used in table 2.3, including the year and state dummies. All regressions use weighted least squares, where the weighting is each state's population. *The result is statistically significant at the 1 percent level for a two-tailed t-test. **The result is statistically significant at the 5 percent level for a two-tailed t-test.

The arrest rates for murder produce more interesting results. The percent of white victims and the percent of victims killed by family members both declined when arrest rates were increased, while the percent of black victims and the percent killed by non—family members whom they knew both increased. The results imply that higher arrest rates have a much greater deterrent effect on murders involving whites and family members. One explanation is that whites with higher incomes face a greater increase in expected penalties for any given increase in the probability of arrest.

Mass Public Shootings

Chapter 1 noted the understandable fear that people have of mass public shootings like the one on the Long Island Railroad or at the top of the Empire State Building. To record the number of mass public shootings by state from 1977 to 1992, a search was done of news-article databases (Nexis) for the same period examined in the rest of this study. A mass public shooting is denned as one that occurred in a public place and involved two or more people either killed or injured by the shooting. The crimes excluded involved gang activity; drug dealing; a holdup or a robbery; drive-by shootings that explicitly or implicitly involved gang activity, organized crime, or professional hits; and serial killings, or killings that took place over the span of more than one day. The places where public shootings occurred included such sites as schools, churches, businesses, bars, streets, government buildings, public transit facilities, places of employment, parks, health care facilities, malls, and restaurants.

Unlike my earlier data, these data are available only at the state level. Table 5.3 shows the mean rate at which such killings occurred both before and after the adoption of the nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws in the ten states that changed their laws during the 1977 to 1992 period and, more broadly, for all states that either did or did not have such laws during the period. In each case the before-and-after means are quite statistically significantly different at least at the 1 percent level, 3 with the rates being dramatically lower when nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws were in effect. For those states from which data are available before and after the passage of such laws, the mean per-capita death rate from mass shootings in those states plummets by 69 percent. 4

To make sure that these differences were not due to some other factor, I reestimated the specifications used earlier to explain murder rates for the state-level regressions with time trends before and after the adoption of the nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws. The variable being ex-

Table 5.3 Mass shooting deaths and injuries

Mean death and injury rate per year for years in which the states do not have nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws

(i)

Mean death and injury rate per year for years in which the states do have nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws (2)

Number of mass shooting deaths and injuries for the ten states that changed their laws during the 1977-1992 period

Mass shooting deaths and injuries per 100,000 population for the ten states