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

is significant at the 1 percent level. **The F-test is significant at the 5 percent level. ***The F-test is significant at the 10 percent level. ****The F-test is significant at the 15 percent level.

Ayres and Donohue find that violent-crime rates consistently fall in states adopting right-to-carry laws after 1987, but the effect is often statistically insignificant. The drops in violent crime appear much larger and more significant for the earlier states. Indeed, as reported earlier in this book, Maine and Florida experience two of the three largest overall drops in violent crime (see table 4.9). Yet the focus on the before-and-after averages again obscures the benefits from right-to-carry laws.

The results presented in table 9.8 take the two approaches that I have been using: the estimated number of permits issued in a state and the differences between the trends in crime rates before and after the adoption of the right-to-carry laws. With the exception of rape, Maine and Florida experience greater drops in all violent-crime categories, but all the violent-crime rates decline for states adopting right-to-carry laws during the post-1987 period and all but two of these declines are statistically significant at least at the 10 percent level. The estimates using the percentage of the population with permits imply that there were no statistically different effects for the two sets of states for murder and rape.

13 Was it proper to assume that more permits were issued in the more populous counties after right-to-carry laws were adopted?

Since the links between the issuance of permits and the crime reduction that Lott attributes to the shall issue laws is so crucial to establishing causality, more research on this issue is needed. Lott's county population proxies rely on his assumption that population density is a good predictor of the difficulty in obtaining permits under discretionary laws. However, if many states went directly from prohibiting concealed weapons to a non-discretionary law (like Arizona), Lott's assumed relationship between permits and density would break down. (Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue III, "Nondiscretionary Concealed Weapons Laws: A Case Study of Statistics, Standards of Proof, and Public Policy," American Law and Economics Review 1, nos. 1-2 [Fall 1999]: 446)

The original tests shown in figures 4.1 and 4.2 were based upon conversations that I had had with state officials in nondiscretionary states. If the state officials' claims were correct that high-population counties had been much more restrictive in issuing permits than low-population counties, adoption of right-to-carry laws would have seen the biggest issuance of permits in these counties and thus the biggest drops in crime. The results confirmed this prediction. Obviously, this claim depends upon all the states switching from discretionary to nondiscretionary laws, and indeed all the states examined for the tests shown in these earlier figures did make that change. None of the states during 1977—1992

Table 9.8 Reexamining the claim that states adopting the law before and after December 1987 were differently affected by right-to-carry laws

Percent change in various crime rates for changes in explanatory variables

Violent

crime Murder

AggravatedProperty Auto

Rape Robberyassault crime BurglaryLarcenytheft

States adopting law prior to December 1987: one-percentage-point change in the share of the state population with permits to carry concealed handguns

States adopting law after December 1987: one-percentage-point change in the share of the state population with permits to carry concealed handguns

States adopting law prior to December 1987: change in the crime rate from the difference in the annual change in crime rates in the

-15.8% a -5A% b

-4.1% a

-2.7% a

-72%*-92%*

-3.9% d-9.1%' -19.1% a -15.5% a -6.1% a -22.6% a -8.9% a

-5.0" -1.056 -7.*

4.856* -2.056* 8.756* 0.34%

-0.9% -7.1%* -5.7%* -2.4%* -1.1% -4.1%* -4.1%*

years before and after the adoption of the right-to-carry law (annual rate of change after the law — annual rate of change before the law) States adopting law after -1.7%* -0.7%*** -3.3%* -2.9%* -2.4%* -0.7*% -2.4%* 0.5%* -1.4%*

December 1987: change in the crime rate from the difference in the annual change in crime rates in the years before and after the adoption of the right-to-carry law (annual rate of change after the law — annual rate of change before the law)

a The result is significant at the 1 percent level for a two-tailed t-test. b The result is significant at the 5 percent level for a two-tailed t-test. c The result is significant at the 10 percent level for a two-tailed t-test. d The result is significant at the 12 percent level for a two-tailed t-test. *The F-test is significant at the 1 percent level. **The F-test is significant at the 5 percent level. ***The F-test is significant at the 10 percent level. ****The F-test is significant at the 15 percent level.

switched from not issuing any permits to nondiscretionary rules. Arizona made its change in late 1994.

The updated results in the epilogue have continued to remain conscious of this issue, and I found that the more populous counties in states that changed from discretionary to nondiscretionary laws had bigger relative drops in violent-crime rates than states that changed from banning concealed handguns to nondiscretionary laws.

14 Did the passage of right-to-carry laws result in more guns being carried in public places^

Perhaps by "more guns," Lott means more guns carried in public places. However, surveys indicate that 5-11% of US adults admit to carrying guns, dwarfing the 1% or so of the population that obtained concealed-weapon permits.... And if those who got permits were merely legitimating what they were already doing before the new laws, it would mean there was no increase at all in carrying or in actual risks to criminals. One can