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

I claimed. They conclude that their results "indicate that more guns generally lead to fewer rather than more murders, and that it would be wrong to dismiss right-to-carry laws on the ground that more guns mean more danger, without considering their discouraging effect on potential murders." m

Another paper by Florenz Plassman and Nicolaus Tideman examines the deterrent effects of right-to-carry laws both across states and over time. They find that all the states that adopted the laws between 1977 and 1992 experienced reductions in murder, rape, and robbery between the year the law was passed and the first, second and third full years that the law was in effect. 110 Other recent evidence by David Mustard suggests that right-to-carry laws help reduce the rate at which police are murdered.

The book reviews in economic journals have been favorable. 111 As one academic review claimed, "his empirical analysis sets a standard that will

be difficult to match this has got to be the most extensive empirical

study of crime deterrence that has been done to date.. .. The results are extremely robust, but they are also consistent with the theoretical principles." 112 Other academics from Northwestern University, the University of Texas, George Washington University, George Mason University, and Cardozo School of Law have also written supportive reviews. 113

Yet, to me, the most remarkable thing about this debate is what goes unsaid. None of my academic critics has mentioned anything about the other gun-control laws that I have examined. Not a single academic has challenged my findings that the Brady law or state waiting periods or background checks caused some crime rates to increase. In fact, they have all avoided including these laws in their own research. Nonetheless, gun-control organizations, such as Handgun Control, to this day still attack me for supposedly not accounting for other gun-control laws in my research.

Conclusion

The noise came suddenly from behind early Tuesday— feet rapidly pounding the pavement, voices cursing. Before Jim Shaver could turn around, he was knocked to the ground at East 13th Avenue and Mill Street, fighting off punches from two young men. Police said the assailants figured they'd found a drug dealer to rob, someone who'd have both drugs and money. They couldn't have been more wrong. Their victim was a 49-year-old nurse on his way to work—a nurse with a concealed weapons permit. The fists kept flying, even as Shaver told them— twice, he said—that he had a gun. Fearing for his life, Shaver pulled a .22-caliber revolver out of his coat pocket and fired several shots. One of them hit 19-year-old Damien Alexander Long in the right hip. Long's alleged accomplice, Brandon Heath Durrett, 20, wasn't injured. The pair ran off. 114

A man who police said kidnapped a 2-year-old child and robbed a disabled elderly woman of a medical monitor was in jail Friday after he was captured and held at gun point by a man with a license to carry a concealed handgun. ... "I have never pulled a gun on anyone before, and I wouldn't have pulled a gun on this man if he had not run off with that little girl," [the man who stopped the crime] said. "That mother was screaming for her child. She was quite upset." 115

Awe-struck Phoenix police declared Mr. Vertigan a hero and gave him $500 and a new pistol for catching a cop killer after running out of ammunition in a gunfight with three heavily armed men. Mr. Vertigan ... came upon three armed Mexican drug-traffickers fatally ambushing a uniformed Phoenix policeman who was patrolling alone in Phoenix's tough Maryvale precinct. Firing 14 shots with his left hand during a slam-and-bump car chase that left the killers' license number imprinted on the front of his own car, Mr. Vertigan emptied his Glock 31 .357 Sig. He wounded the shooter, who was firing at him, and forced the getaway car to crash, slowing the shooter's partners long enough for pursuing police to seize them, as well as a pound of cocaine "eight balls" they were dealing from their white Lincoln. "I always felt that if my life was in danger or anyone around me was in immediate danger I never would hesitate to use that gun. Unfortunately, that day came," Mr. Vertigan said. 116

A man who tried to commit an armed robbery at a Ben-salem convenience store Friday morning was thwarted by a customer who pulled out his own gun and fired five

shots at the crook Fearing he would be killed, police

said, the customer began shooting at the suspect.... Police said the clerks were "a little shaken up" after the attempted robbery—but they guessed that the would-be robber was probably just as shocked. "I'll bet he never expected that to happen," said Fred Harran, Bensalem's deputy director of public safety. 117

All these recent cases involved individuals with permitted concealed handguns. During 1999 concealed permit holders have prevented bank robberies, stopped what could have been a bloody attack by gang members at a teenage girl's high school graduation party, and stopped carjackings. 118 In the couple of months during which I was updating this book, armed citizens have helped capture murderers who had escaped prison, stopped hostage taking at a business which otherwise surely would have resulted in multiple deaths, and prevented robberies and rapes. 119 Residential attacks that were stopped by citizens with guns during 1999 were extremely common. 120

One of the bigger puzzles to me has been the news coverage on guns. Admittedly, some of it is easy to explain. Suppose a media outlet has two stories to choose from: one in which there is a dead body on the ground and it is a sympathetic person like a victim, another in which a women brandishes a gun and the attacker runs away, no shots are fired, no dead bodies are on the ground, and no crime is actually consummated. It