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

nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws reduced violent crimes by more than they reduced property crimes.

Both sets of estimates provide strong evidence that higher arrest rates reduce crime rates. Among violent crimes, rape consistently appears to be the most sensitive to higher arrest rates. Among property crimes, larceny is the most sensitive to higher arrest rates.

The estimates explaining which states adopt concealed-handgun laws show that the states adopting these laws are relatively Republican with large National Rifle Association memberships and low but rising rates of violent crime and property crime. The set of regressions used to explain the arrest rate shows that arrest rates are lower in high-income, sparsely populated, Republican areas where crime rates are increasing. This evidence calls into question claims that police forces are not catching criminals in high-crime, densely populated areas.

I reestimated the state-level data using similar specifications. The coefficients on the variables for both arrest rates and concealed-handgun laws remained consistently negative and statistically significant. The state-level data again implied a much stronger effect from the passage of concealed-handgun laws and a much weaker effect from higher arrest rates. In order to use the longer data series available for the nonpolice employment and payroll variables, I even reestimated the regressions without those variables. This produced similar results. 7

Finally, using the predicted values for the arrest rates allows us to investigate the significance of another weakness of the data. The arrest-rate data suffers not only from some missing observations but also from some instances where it is undefined when the crime rate in a county equals zero. This last issue is problematic only for murders and rapes in low-

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population counties. In these cases, both the numerator and denominator in the arrest rate equal zero, and it is not clear whether I should count this as an arrest rate equal to 100 or 0 percent, neither of which is correct, as it is truly undefined. The previously reported evidence arising from regressions that were run only on the larger counties (population over 10,000) sheds some light on this question, since these counties have fewer observations with undefined arrest rates. In addition, if the earlier reported evidence that adopting nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws changed the number of permits the least in the lower-population counties, one would expect relatively little change in counties with missing observations.

The analysis presented in this section allowed us to try another, more appropriate approach to deal with this issue. 8 1 created predicted arrest rates for these observations using the regressions that explain the arrest rate, and then I reestimated the regressions with the new, larger samples. While the coefficient for murder declined, implying a 5 percent drop when nondiscretionary laws are adopted, the coefficient for rape increased, implying a drop of more than 10 percent. Only very small changes appeared in the other estimates. All coefficients were statistically significant. The effect of arrest rates also remained negative and statistically significant. As one final test to deal with the problems that arise from using the arrest rates, I reestimated the regressions using only the predicted values for the nondiscretionary-law variable. In this case the coefficients were always negative and statistically significant, and they indicate that these laws produce an even larger negative effect on crime than the effect shown in the results already reported.

Conclusion

Explicitly accounting for the factors that influence a state's decision to adopt a nondiscretionary concealed-handgun law and that determine the arrest rate only serves to strengthen the earlier results: with this approach, both concealed-handgun laws and arrest rates explain much larger percentages of the changes in the crime rate than they did earlier. Several other facts are clear. Nondiscretionary laws have so far been adopted by relatively low-crime states in which the crime rate is rising. These states have also tended to vote Republican and to have high percentages of their populations enrolled in the National Rifle Association. For studies that use the number of police officers as a proxy for the level of law enforcement, these results suggest some caution. Property-crime rates appear to have no systematic relationship to the number of police officers either with or without the power to make arrests. For vio-

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lent crime, the presence of more police officers with arrest powers lowers the arrest rate, while a greater number of police officers without arrest powers raises the arrest rate.

Neither of these results alone is particularly troubling, because increasing the number of police officers could reduce the crime rate enough so that the arrest rate could fall even if the officers did not slack off. Theoretically, the relationship between the number of police officers and the arrest rate could go either way. Yet in the case of violent crimes, the drop in arrest rates associated with more police officers is too large to be explained by a drop in the crime rate. In fact, the direct relationship between the number of police officers and violent crime implies a positive relationship. There are many possible explanations for this. Quite plausibly, the presence of more police officers encourages people to come forward to report crime. Another possibility is that relatively large police forces tend to be unionized and have managed to require less work from their officers. The bottom line is that using the number of police officers directly as a proxy for the level of law enforcement is at best a risky proposition. We must control for many other factors before we know exactly what we are measuring.

Seven The Political and

Academic Debate

The Political Process

When my original study was released, many commentators were ready to attack it. Anyone who had shown any interest in looking at the article was given a copy while I was in the process of revising it for the Journal of Legal Studies, although I quickly learned that it was not common practice to