More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws. - book reviews

Reason, August-Sept, 1998 by Daniel D. Polsby

by John R. Lott Jr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 225 pages, $23.00

About half the U.S. population lives in one of the 31 states with relatively permissive laws regulating who may carry a concealed firearm. These states range from northern New England (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont) to the deep South (Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida), the Piedmont (Virginia, North Carolina) to the Southwest (Oklahoma, Texas), the upper Midwest (the Dakotas) to the Pacific Northwest (Washington). They include urban states (Pennsylvania), suburban states (Connecticut), rural states (West Virginia and Montana), and everything in between. The other half of America's people live in jurisdictions like New York, where access to concealed-carry permits is limited to those who can demonstrate a specific need for potentially deadly self-protection, or Illinois, where no one other than peace officers may carry a gun.

A massive natural experiment is thus under way, one that will ultimately tell us whether liberal gun carrying laws are good or bad policy. The early results are striking. It can no longer be seriously argued that relaxing the rules against concealed carrying of handguns is an invitation to violence, to bloody shootouts over fender-benders or football games. That sort of thing, always rare, is essentially absent from crime statistics, no matter what a state's rules concerning who may carry a gun in public. What's more, it is beginning to look as though, when a state authorizes private persons to carry handguns, it takes an important step toward suppressing serious crime.

What is at issue in gun control debates is people's (mostly untutored) intuitions about which of two conflicting theories of human behavior has the upper hand in the real world. The first of these theories, sometimes called the "instrumentality theory" of lethal outcomes, holds that when firearms are more readily available, offenses such as armed robbery and murder - and impulsive homicides especially - should increase because guns make it easier to commit crimes.

The opposite theory is that of "general deterrence," which can be summed up in one phrase: more guns, less crime. That, not coincidentally, is the title of an important new book by one of America's most resourceful and fearless econometricians, John Lott, who for the last several years has been the John M. Olin Visiting Fellow in Law and Economics at the University of Chicago Law School.

Each of these theories captures a certain amount of reality. We know, for example, that x number of impulsive homicides would not occur in a gun-free world. On the other hand, we also know that the prospect of meeting armed resistance changes the calculations of human actors, whether they intend good or mischief. That is why we insist that Brinks guards, soldiers, and Secret Service agents carry guns. We recognize that if they did not, their ability to deter predators would shrink or, in some cases, altogether disappear. To know what firearms policy to pursue, one has to know which of these tendencies dominates the other. Like so many other questions with a seemingly ideological leading edge, this one, at bottom, turns out to be empirical.

For many years the public debate about which theory to credit was carried out either by a priori reasoning or, worse, through weak and often tendentious small-scale studies, many of them sponsored by openly results-oriented grantors at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Almost all of these studies, if one may call them that, affirmed that guns were a "public health" hazard that was spreading by leaps and bounds, the outstanding "risk factor" for suicide and murder. The New England Journal of Medicine, in particular, has specialized in publishing such regrettable stuff, commonly complementing it with overwrought editorials calling upon Americans for God's sake at last to surrender their guns.

The instrumentality theory enjoys something of a monopoly among the news media and is a veritable litmus test for membership in Washington's intellectual establishment. One might as well believe in flying saucers as doubt the proposition that schoolyard massacres are "caused" by America's sick love affair with the gun. Congressional Democrats (to say nothing of the executive branch) are dose to unanimous on this; but Republicans - of the sort who long to be labeled "sensible" or "pragmatic" in newspaper editorials, from Richard Nixon to George Bush - think so too. Practically every gun control initiative of the last 30 years, including the Brady Act and the 1994 "assault weapons" ban, has been based on the premise that restricting the supply of firearms and thereby raising their price should reduce violent crime rates.

Every bit of this, we now know, has been wrongheaded and perverse. Since 1977, the U.S. Department of Justice has kept statistics on the most serious crimes (such as murder, rape, and robbery) in the 3,054 counties of the United States. In 1997 Lott and his collaborator, David Mustard (who was then a University of Chicago graduate student and is now a professor of economics at the University of Georgia), published an analysis of these data, the largest econometric study of crime and violence ever done, in The Journal of Legal Studies.