More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws

Public Interest, Fall, 1998 by Michael Barone

Similarly on guns: The national political dialogue has been dominated by demands for gun control, and in 1994, Congress passed, as part of a crime bill, measures increasing the waiting period for purchasing guns, requiring a background check (the latter was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1997) and banning certain "assault weapons" based on their appearance. But these measures have had far less effect on public policy and - if John R. Lott, Jr., is right - in reducing crime than the 31 state laws, '23 of them passed since 1985, all.owing law-abiding citizens to get permits to carry concealed weapons. These CCW laws cover almost half the nation's population (49.95 percent according to 1997 estimates).

Lott first issued his findings in the January 1997 Journal of Legal Studies and now has published them, with responses to his critics, in More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws.(*) His article has aroused vehement protests from national elites advocating gun control, and so surely will his book. His findings would likely produce mostly silent nods of agreement from voters in the 31 states with concealed-weapons laws. While many national gun-control advocates would like to see the United States become a nation like Britain, in which few citizens own guns, gun ownership has been rapidly increasing - from 27 percent to 37 percent of voters in the 1988 and 1996 exit polls. Something on the order of 75 million Americans own more than 200 million guns.

For Lott this is good news. As he summarizes his conclusions: "(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 (3) the magnitude of the drops, both across counties and states and over time, corresponds to the number of permits issued." Concealed-weapons laws work, he argues, because "criminals are motivated by self-preservation, and handguns can therefore be a deterrent." The knowledge that potential victims may be armed deters criminals from crimes, and victims, by brandishing a gun or (much more rarely) shooting it, foil many attempted crimes.

It is a plausible argument, and Lott tests it with data from all 3,000-plus counties over the years 1977 to 1994 - a far larger data set than in previous studies. Using sophisticated statistical techniques - he is an economist - he focuses on state and county crime rates before and after concealed-weapons laws were adopted. He then attempts to control for other factors - changes in other gun laws and in sentencing, arrest rates, crime rates, conviction rates, county population size, racial composition, percentages of males and females in particular age groups, unemployment and poverty rates. His conclusions, to oversimplify a bit, are that concealed-weapons laws significantly reduce violent crimes - murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault - while having less effect on, and possibly even causing an increase in, nonviolent property crime - burglary, larceny, auto theft. He estimates that there would have been 1,400 more murders in concealed-weapons states in 1992 in the absence of those laws and 4,000 more rapes.

Moreover, he says, the positive effects were greatest in high-population counties and central cities, as well as among women and blacks. This makes sense. Blacks are disproportionately likely to be crime victims; women are vulnerable to physical attack; and central city law-enforcement officials, when they had discretion to deny concealed-weapons permits, almost always did so, and so the rise in the number of law-abiding citizens carrying concealed weapons was especially great there once issuance of permits became mandatory. As to the risk of concealed weapons being misused, Lott points out that in 1988 states that allow them had only 22 accidental gun deaths. In contrast, the 1994 Brady bill's waiting periods and background checks had no positive impact and may have led to an increase in rape and aggravated assault.

These are devastating results for national gun-control advocates, and they have responded furiously. Many charged Lott with being financed by the gun industry, although the Olin Foundation, which financed his research, has no connection with the Olin Corporation (one division of which manufactures ammunition). Critics charged that the whole positive effect he showed came from Florida, whose crime rate may have been affected by one-time events like the Mariel boatlift. But the critics included only a small number of counties in their reply, and Lott shows that his results are similar without Florida anyway. The critics' selectivity indicates they are less interested in accuracy than they are desperate to discredit this study in any way - and confident that an almost unanimously pro-gun-control mainstream media will cooperate with them.

My judgment is that the data and the political tide are on Lott's side - and I say this even though my instinctive preference would be to live in a country as free of guns as Britain. Indeed, many of the arguments of national gun-control advocates are arguments not for the measures they propose, which have made only the most marginal impact on the number and availability of guns in the United States, but for the elimination of guns altogether. With so many guns available, legally and illegally, waiting periods and background checks are not going to prevent tragedies like the shooting of Jim Brady or the murder of Representative Carolyn McCarthy's husband or the killing of the two Capitol Police officers. But guns will never be eliminated from the United States. The government is not going to seize the 200 million guns now in private hands. And whatever the distaste of the legal elite for the Second Amendment, it stands somewhere in the way between a law prohibiting private possession of nuclear weapons and one depriving citizens of all guns.