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

all—to the actual merits of the research. I was also surprised by the absolute confidence shown by gun-control advocates that they could garner extensive news coverage whenever they wanted.

Criticisms of the Original Study

A second line of attack came from academic, quasi-academic, and gun-control advocacy groups concerning the competence with which the study was conducted. Many of these objections were dealt with somewhere in the original study, which admittedly is very long. Yet it should have been easy enough for critics—especially academics—to check.

The attacks have been fairly harsh, especially by the standards of academic discourse. For example,

"They highlight things that support their hypothesis while they ignore things contrary to their hypothesis," said Daniel Webster, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University Center for Gun Policy and Research.

"We think the study falls far short of any reasonable standard of good social science research in making [their] case " said economist Daniel

THEPOLITICALANDACADEMIC DEBATE/129

Nagin of Carnegie-Mellon University, who has analyzed Lott's data with colleague Dan Black. 17

I have made the data I used available to all academics who have requested them, and so far professors at twenty-four universities have taken advantage of that. Of those who have made the effort to use the extensive data set, Dan Black and Daniel Nagin have been the only ones to publicly criticize the study.

The response from some academics, particularly those at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, has been highly unusual in many ways. For instance, who has ever heard of academics mounting an attack on a scholarly study by engaging in a systematic letter-writing campaign to local newspapers around the country? 18 One letter from a citizen to the Springfield (Illinois) State Journal-Register noted, "Dear Editor: Golly, I'm impressed that the staff at Johns Hopkins University reads our local State Journal-Register. I wonder if they subscribe to it." 19

The rest of this chapter briefly reviews the critiques and then provides my responses to their concerns. I discuss a number of issues below that represent criticisms raised in a variety of published or unpublished research papers as well as in the popular press:

1 Is the scale of the effect realistic?

Large reductions in violence are quite unlikely because they would be out of proportion to the small scale of the change in carrying firearms that the legislation produced. (Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins, "Concealed-Handgun Permits: The Case of the Counterfeit Deterrent," The Responsive Community [Spring 1997]: 59, cited hereafter as Zimring and Hawkins, "Counterfeit Deterrent")

In some states, like Pennsylvania, almost 5 percent of the population has concealed-handgun permits. In others, like Florida, the portion is about

2 percent and growing quickly. The question here is whether these percentages of the population are sufficient to generate 8 percent reductions in murders or 5 percent reductions in rapes. One important point to take into account is that applicants for permits do not constitute a random sample of the population. Applicants are likely to be those most at risk. The relevant comparison is not between the percentage of the population being attacked and the percentage of the entire population holding permits, but between the percentage of the population most vulnerable to attack and the percentage of that population holding permits.

Let us consider some numbers from the sample to see how believable

these results are. The yearly murder rate for the average county is 5.65 murders per 100,000 people, that is, .00565 percent of the people in the average county are murdered each year. An 8 percent change in this murder rate amounts to a reduction of 0.0005 percent. Obviously, even if only 2 percent of the population have handgun permits, that 2 percent is a huge number relative to the 0.0005 percent reduction in the murder rate. Even the largest category of violent crimes, aggravated assault, involves 180 cases per 100,000 people in the average county per year (that is, 0.18 percent of the people are victims of this crime in the typical year). A 7 percent change in this number implies that the assault rate declines from 0.18 percent of the population to 0.167 percent of the population. Again, this 0.013 percent change in the assault rate is quite small compared to the observed changes in the number of concealed-handgun permits.

Even if those who carry concealed handguns face exactly the same risk of being attacked as everyone else, a 2 percent increase in the portion of the population carrying concealed handguns seems comparable to the percentage-point reductions in crime. Bearing in mind that those carrying guns are most likely to be at risk, the drop in crime rates correlated with the presence of these guns even begins to seem relatively small. Assuming that just 2 percent of the population carries concealed handguns, the drop in the murder rate only requires that 0.025 percent of those with concealed-handgun permits successfully ward off a life-threatening attack to achieve the 0.0005 percent reduction in the murder rate. The analogous percentage for aggravated assaults is only 0.65 percent. In other words, if less than seven-tenths of one percent of those with concealed handguns successfully ward off an assault, that would account for the observed drop in the assault rate.

2The importance of "crime cycles"

Crime rates tend to be cyclical with somewhat predictable declines following several years of increases... . Shall-issue laws, as well as a number of other measures intended to reduce crime, tend to be enacted during periods of rising crime. Therefore, the reductions in violent crime ... attribute^] to the implementation of shall-issue laws may be due to the variety of other crime-fighting measures, or to a commonly observed downward drift in crime levels towards some long-term average. (Daniel W. Webster, "The Claims That Right-to-Carry Laws Reduce Violent Crime Are Unsubstantiated " The Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, copy obtained March 6, 1997, p. 1; cited hereafter as Webster, "Claims")