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

Factor for Homicide in the Home," New England Journal ofMedicine (Oct. 7, 1993): 1084-91.

7. Ibid., p. 1084.

8. The interesting letter that provoked this response from Kellermann et al. was written by students in a graduate statistics class at St. Louis University. See the New England Journal of Medicine (Feb. 3, 1994): 366, 368.

9. Recent attempts to relate the crime rate to the prison population concern me. Besides difficulties in relating the total prison population to any particular type of crime, I think it is problematic to compare a stock (the prison population) with a flow (the crime rate). See, for example, Steven Levitt, "The Effect of Prison Population Size on Crime Rates: Evidence from Prison Overcrowding Litigation," Quarterly Journal of Economics 111 (1996): 144-67.

10. Gary S. Becker, "Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach," Journal of Political Economy 76 (Mar./Apr. 1968): 169—217. See also, for example, Isaac Ehrlich, "Participation in Illegitimate Activities: A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation," Journal of Political Economy 81 (1973): 521-65; Michael K. Block and John Heineke, "A Labor Theoretical Analysis of Criminal Choice," American Economic Review 65 (June 1975): 314—25; William M. Landes, "An Economic Study of U.S. Aircraft Hijacking, 1961—1976," Journal of Law and Economics 21 (Apr. 1978): 1—29.; John R. Lott, Jr., "Juvenile Delinquency and Education: A Comparison of Public and Private Provision," International Review of Law and Economics 1 (Dec. 1987): 163—75; James Andreoni, "Criminal Deterrence in the Reduce Form: A New Perspective on Ehr-lich's Seminal Study," Economic Inquiry 33 (July 1995): 476—83; Morgan O. Reynolds, "Crime and Punishment in America," (Dallas: National Center for Policy Analysis, June 1995); and Levitt, "Effect of Prison Population Size on Crime Rates."

11. John R. Lott, Jr., "Do We Punish High-Income Criminals Too Heavily?" Economic Inquiry 30 (Oct. 1992): 583-608.

12. John R. Lott, Jr., "The Effect of Conviction on the Legitimate Income of Criminals," Economics Letters 34 (Dec. 1990): 381-85 ; John R. Lott, Jr., "An Attempt at Measuring the Total Monetary Penalty from Drug Convictions: The Importance of an Individual's Reputation," Journal of Legal Studies 21 (Jan. 1992): 159-87.

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13. This approach is also known as controlling for "fixed effects," where a separate dummy variable is used to account for each county.

14. James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, "Making Neighborhoods Safe," Atlantic Monthly, Feb. 1989, and "Broken Windows," Atlantic Monthly, Mar. 1982.

15. Arson was excluded because of a large number of inconsistencies in the data and the small number of counties reporting this measure.

16. Robbery includes street robbery, commercial robbery, service station robbery, convenience store robbery, residence robbery, and bank robbery. (See also the discussion of burglary regarding why the inclusion of residence robbery creates difficulty with this broad measure.) After I wrote the original paper, two different commentators attempted to argue that "If 'shall-issue' [a synonym for "nondiscretionary"] concealed-carrying laws really deter criminals from undertaking street crimes, then it is only reasonable to expect the laws to have an impact on robberies. Robbery takes place between strangers on the street. A high percentage of homicide and rape, on the other hand, occurs inside a home—where concealed-weapons laws should have no impact. These findings strongly suggest that something else—not new concealed-carry laws—is responsible for the reduction in crime observed by the authors." See, for example, Doug Weil, "Response to John Lott's Study on the Impact of'Carry-Concealed' Laws on Crime Rates," U.S. Newswire, Aug. 8,1996. The curious aspect of the emphasis on robbery over other crimes like murder and rape is that if robbery is the most obvious crime to be affected by gun-control laws, why have virtually no gun-control studies examined robberies? In fact, Kleck's literature survey only notes one previous gun-control study that examined the issue of robberies ("Guns and Violence: An Interpretive Review of the Field," Social Pathology 1 [Jan. 1995]: 12—47). More important, given that the FBI includes many categories of robberies besides those that "take place between strangers on the street," it is not obvious why this category should exhibit the greatest sensitivity to concealed-handgun laws.

17. "NRA poll: Salespeople No. 1 for Permit Applications," Dallas Morning News, Apr. 19, 1996, p. 32A.

18. For example, see Arnold S. Linsky, Murray A. Strauss, and Ronet Bachman-Prehn, "Social Stress, Legitimate Violence, and Gun Availability," Paper presented at the annual meetings of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, 1988; and Clayton E. Cramer and David B. Kopel, "'Shall Issue': The New Wave of Concealed-Handgun Permit Laws," Tennessee Law Review 62 (Spring 1995): 680-91.

19. Among those who made this comment to David Mustard and me were Bob Bar-nhart, Manager of the Intelligence/Concealed Handgun United of Multnomah County, Oregon; Mike Woodward, of the Oregon Law Enforcement Data System; Joe Vincent of the Washington Department of Licensing Firearms Unit; Alan Krug, who provided us with the Pennsylvania Permit data; and Susan Harrell of the Florida Department of State Concealed Weapons Division. Evidence for this point with respect to Virginia was obtained from Eric Lipton, "Virginians Get Ready to Conceal Arms: State's New Weapon Law Brings a Flood of Inquiries," Washington Post, June 28, 1995, p. Al, who notes that "analysts say the new law, which drops the requirement that prospective gun carriers show a 'demonstrated need' to be armed, likely won't make much of a difference in rural areas, where judges have long issued permits to most people who applied for them. But in urban areas such as Northern Virginia—where judges granted few permits because few residents could justify a need for them—the number of concealed weapon permits issued is expected to soar. In Fairfax, for