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

Despite claims to the contrary, the regressions do control for national and state crime trends in several different ways. At the national level, I

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use a separate variable for each year, a technique that allows me to account for the changes in average national crime rates from one year to another. Any national cycles in crime rates should be accounted for by this method. At the state level, some of the estimates use a separate time trend for each state, and the results with this method generally yielded even larger drops in violent-crime rates associated with nondiscretionary (shall-issue) laws.

To illustrate that the results are not merely due to the "normal" ups and downs for crime, we can look again at the diagrams in chapter 4 showing crime patterns before and after the adoption of the nondiscretionary laws. The declines not only begin right when the concealed-handgun laws pass, but the crime rates end up well below their levels prior to the law. Even if laws to combat crime are passed when crime is rising, why would one believe that they happened to be passed right at the peak of any crime cycle?

As to the concern that other changes in law enforcement may have been occurring at the same time, the estimates account for changes in other gun-control laws and changes in law enforcement as measured by arrest and conviction rates as well as by prison terms. No previous study of crime has attempted to control for as many different factors that might explain changes in the crime rate.

3Did I assume that there was an immediate and constant effect from these laws and that the effect should be the same everywhere?

The "statistical models assumed: (1) an immediate and constant effect of shall-issue laws, and (2) similar effects across different states and counties." (Webster, "Claims," p. 2; see also Dan Black and Daniel Nagin, "Do 'Right-to-Carry' Laws Deter Violent Crime?" Journal of Legal Studies 27 [January 1998], p. 213.)

One of the central arguments both in the original paper and in this book is that the size of the deterrent effect is related to the number of permits issued, and it takes many years before states reach their long-run level of permits. Again, the figures in chapter 4 illustrate this quite clearly.

I did not expect the number of permits to change equally across either counties or states. A major reason for the larger effect on crime in the more urban counties was that in rural areas, permit requests already were being approved; hence it was in urban areas that the number of permitted concealed handguns increased the most.

A week later, in response to a column that I published in the Omaha World-Herald, 20 Mr. Webster modified this claim somewhat:

Lott claims that his analysis did not assume an immediate and constant effect, but that is contrary to his published article, in which the vast majority of the statistical models assume such an effect. (Daniel W. Webster, "Concealed-Gun Research Flawed," Omaha World-Herald, March 12, 1997; emphasis added.)

When one does research, it is most appropriate to take the simplest specifications first and then gradually make things more complicated. The simplest way of doing this is to examine the mean crime rates before and after the change in a law. Then one would examine the trends that existed before and after the law. This is the pattern that I followed in my earlier work, and I have followed the same pattern here. The bottom line should be, How did the different ways of examining the data affect the results? What occurs here is that (1) the average crime rate falls after the nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws are adopted; (2) violent-crime rates were rising until these laws were adopted, and they fell dramatically after that; and (3) the magnitude of the drops, both across counties and states and over time, corresponds to the number of permits issued.

4When were these concealed-handgun laws adopted in different states?

Lott and Mustard also use incorrect dates of shall-issue law implementation in their analyses. For example, they claim that Virginia adopted its

shall-issue law in 1988 Some populous counties in Virginia continued

to issue very few permits until 1995 (after the study period), when the state eliminated this discretion. Lott and Mustard identify 1985 as the year in which Maine liberalized its concealed-carry policy. It is unclear why they chose 1985 as the year of policy intervention, because the state changed its concealed-carry law in 1981, 1983, 1985, 1989, and 1991. (Webster, "Claims," p. 3; see also Daniel W Webster, "Concealed-Gun Research Flawed," Omaha World-Herald, March 12, 1997; cited hereafter as Webster, "Flawed.")

I do think that Virginia's 1988 law clearly attempted to take away local discretion in issuing permits, and, indeed, all but three counties clearly complied with the intent of the law. However, to satisfy any skeptics, I examined whether reclassifying Virginia affected the results: it did not. The 1988 law read as follows:

The court, after consulting the law-enforcement authorities of the county or city and receiving a report from the Central Criminal Records Exchange, shall issue such permit if the applicant is of good character, has demonstrated

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a need to carry such concealed weapon, which need may include but is not limited to lawful defense and security, is physically and mentally competent to carry such weapon, and is not prohibited by law from receiving, possessing, or transporting such weapon [emphasis added]. 21

As with Virginia, I relied on a study by Clayton Cramer and David Kopel to determine when Maine changed its law to a nondiscretionary law. Maine enacted a series of changes in its law in 1981, 1983, 1985, and 1991. The 1985 law did not completely eliminate discretion, but it provided the foundation for what they then considered to be a switch to a de facto shall-issue regime, which was