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

upheld in a number of important state court decisions. 22 The bottom line, however (again, as with Virginia), is that reclassifying Maine (or even eliminating it from the data set) does not change the results much.

5Should robbery be the crime most affected by the adoption of the nondiscretionary law?

Shall-issue laws were adopted principally to deter predatory street crime, the most common example of which is robbery by a stranger. But [the] results indicate that shall-issue laws had little or no effect on robbery rates. Instead the strongest deterrent effects estimated were for rape, aggravated assault, and murder. (Webster, "Claims," p. 3)

Is it credible that laws that allow citizens to carry guns in public appear to have almost no effect on robberies, most of which occur in public spaces, yet do reduce the number of rapes, most of which occur outside of public spaces within someone's home. (Jens Ludwig, speaking on Morning Edition, National Public Radio, 10:00 a.m. ET December 10, 1996.)

I have two responses. First, as anyone who has carefully read this book will know, it is simply not true that the results show "little or no effect on robbery rates." Whether the effect was greater for robbery or other violent crimes depends on whether one simply compares the mean crime rates before and after the laws (in which case the effect is relatively small for robbery) or compares the slopes before and after the law (in which case the effect for robbery is the largest).

Second, it is not clear that robbery should exhibit the largest impacts, primarily because the term robbery encompasses many crimes that are not street robberies. For instance, we do not expect bank or residential robberies to decrease; in fact, they could even rise. Allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns makes street robberies more difficult,

and thus may make other crimes like residential robbery relatively more attractive. Yet not only is it possible that these two different components of robbery could move in opposite directions, but to rank some of these different crimes, one requires information on how sensitive different types of criminals are to the increased threat.

Making claims about what will happen to different types of violent crimes is much more difficult than predicting the relative differences between, say, crimes that involve no contact with victims and crimes that do. Even here, however, some of these questions cannot be settled a priori. For example, when violent crimes decline, more people may feel free to walk around in neighborhoods, which implies that they are more likely to observe the illegal actions of strangers. 23 Criminals who commit violent crimes are also likely to commit some property crimes, and anything that can make an area unattractive to them will reduce both types of crime.

6Do concealed-handgun laws cause criminals to substitute property crimes for rape?

Lott and Mustard argue that criminals, in response to shall-issue laws, substitute property crimes unlikely to involve contact with victims. But their theory and findings do not comport with any credible criminological theory because theft is the motive for only a small fraction of the violent crimes for which Lott and Mustard find shall-issue effects. It is difficult to rationalize why a criminal would, for example, steal a car because he felt deterred from raping or assaulting someone. (Webster, "Claims," p. 4. See also Jens Ludwig, "Do Permissive Concealed-Carry Laws Reduce Violent Crime?" Georgetown University working paper, October 8, 1996, p. 19, hereafter cited as Ludwig, "Permissive Concealed-Carry Laws")

No one believes that hard-core rapists who are committing their crimes only for sexual gratification will turn into auto thieves, though some thefts do also involve aggravated assault, rape, or murder. 24 Indeed, 16 percent of murders in Chicago from 1990 to 1995 occurred in the process of a robbery. 25 What is most likely to happen, however, is that robbers will try to obtain money by other means such as auto theft or larceny. Although it is not unusual for rape victims to be robbed, the decline in rape most likely reflects the would-be rapist's fear of being shot.

I am also not completely clear on what Webster means when he says that "theft is the motive for only a small fraction of violent crimes," since robbery accounted for as much as 34 percent of all violent crimes committed during the sample between 1977 and 1992 (and this excludes robberies that were committed when other more serious crimes like murder or rape occurred in connection with the robbery).

THEPOLITICALANDACADEMIC DEBATE/135

7Comparing crime rates for two to three years before nondiscretionary laws go into effect with crime rates for two to three years after the passage of such laws

If right-to-carry laws have an immediate, substantial impact on the crime rates, the coefficients on the right-to-carry laws immediately after the enactment of the law should be substantially different from those immediately preceding the law's enactment. To test formally for the impact of right-to-carry laws, we see if the sum of the coefficients for two to three years prior to adoption is significantly different from the sum for two and three years following adoption.... Only in the murder equation do our findings agree with Lott and Mustard. In contrast to Lott and Mustard, we find evidence that robberies and larcenies are reduced when right-to-carry laws are passed and no evidence of an impact on rape and aggravated assaults. (Dan Black and Daniel Nagin, "Do 'Right-to-Carry' Laws Deter Violent Crime?" Carnegie-Mellon University working paper, October 16, 1996, p. 7)

Instead of the approach used earlier in this book (a simple time trend and time trend squared for the number of years before and after the concealed-handgun laws) Black and Nagin use ten different variables to examine these trends. Separate variables were used for the first year after the law, the second year after the law, the third year after the law, the fourth year after