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

handguns are shared by all those who are spared being attacked, the costs of providing this protection are borne exclusively by permit holders.

Accidental Deaths and Suicides

Even if nondiscretionary handgun permits reduce murder rates, we are still left with the question of what happens to the rates for accidental death. As more people carry handguns, accidents may be more likely. Earlier, we saw that the number of murders prevented exceeded the entire number of accidental deaths. In the case of suicide, the nondiscretionary laws increase the probability that a gun will be available when an individual feels particularly depressed; thus, they could conceivably lead to an increase in the number of suicides. While only a small portion of accidental deaths are attributable to guns (see appendix 4), the question remains whether concealed-handgun laws affect the total number of deaths through their effect on accidental deaths.

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To get a more precise answer to this question, I used county-level data from 1982 to 1991 in table 5.6 to test whether allowing concealed handguns increased accidental deaths. Data are available from the Mortality Detail Records (provided by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) for all counties from 1982 to 1988 and for counties with populations over 100,000 from 1989 to 1991. The specifications are identical to those shown in all the previous tables, with the exceptions that they no longer include variables related to arrest or conviction rates and that the variables to be explained are either measures of the number of accidental deaths from handguns or measures of accidental deaths from all other nonhandgun sources.

While there is some evidence that the racial composition of the population and the level of welfare payments affect accident rates, the impact of nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws is consistently both quite small economically and insignificant statistically. The first estimate in column 1 implies that accidental deaths from handguns rose by about 0.5 percent when concealed-handgun laws were passed. With only 200 accidental handgun deaths nationwide during 1988 (22 accidental handgun deaths occurred in states with nondiscretionary laws), the implication is that enacting concealed-handgun laws in states that currently do not have them would increase the number of deaths by less than one (.851 deaths). Redoing these tests by adding together accidental handgun deaths and deaths from "unknown" types of guns produces similar results.

With 186 million people living in states without concealed-handgun laws in 1992, 18 the third specification implies that implementing such laws across those remaining states would have resulted in about nine more accidental handgun deaths. 19 Combining this finding with earlier estimates from table 4.1, we find that if the rest of the country had adopted concealed-handgun laws in 1992, the net reduction in total deaths would have been approximately 1,405 to 1,583.

One caveat should be added to these numbers, however: both columns 2 and 4 indicate that accidental deaths from nonhandgun sources increased by more than accidental deaths from handguns after the nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws were implemented. To the extent that the former category increased because of uncontrolled factors that also increase accidental deaths from handguns, the results presented here are biased toward finding that concealed-handgun laws have increased accidental deaths from handguns.

Finally, I examined similar specifications using data on suicide rates. The possibility exists that if a person becomes depressed while away from home, the presence of a concealed handgun might encourage that person

Table 5.6 Did nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws increase the number of accidental deaths? (1982-91 county-level data)

Deaths per 100,000 population

Change in explanatory variable

Nondiscretionary law adopted

Percent change in crime (for Tobit number of deaths per 100,000) for an increase in population of one person per square mile

Percent change in crime (for Tobit number of deaths per 100,000) for an increase in $1,000 of real per-capita personal income

2.67%

-5.7%*

4.4%

-9%*

Note: While not all the coefficient estimates are reported, all the control variables are the same as those used in table 4.1, including year and county dummies. Absolute t-statistics are in parentheses. All regressions weight the data by each county'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 10 percent level for a two-tailed t-test.

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to act impulsively, whereas an enforced delay might ultimately prevent a suicide. If anything, the results implied a statistically insignificant and small increase in suicides (less than one-tenth of 1 percent). Hence it is reasonable to conclude that no relationship exists between concealed-handgun laws and suicide rates.

Total Gun Ownership and Crime

Traditionally, people have tried to use cross-county comparisons of gun ownership and crime rates to determine whether gun ownership enhances or detracts from safety. 20 Worldwide, there is no relationship between gun ownership and crime rates. Many countries, such as Switzerland, Finland, New Zealand, and Israel, have high gun-ownership rates and low crime rates, while many other countries have both low gun-ownership rates and either high or low crime rates. For example, in 1995 Switzerland's murder rate was 40 percent lower than Germany's despite having a three-times higher gun-ownership rate. Yet, making a reliable comparison across countries is an arduous task simply because it is difficult to obtain gun-ownership data both over time and across countries, and to control for all the other differences across the legal systems and cultures across countries. International comparisons are also risky because polls underreport ownership in countries where gun ownership is illegal, and they are conducted by different polling organizations that ask questions in widely differing ways. How crime is measured also varies across countries.

Fortunately, more consistent data are available to investigate the relationship between total gun ownership in the United States and crime. In chapter 3 I presented poll data from general-election