Stumble it!More Firepower? Less Crime?
posted in Politics by themaiden |In an article in the Journal of Legal Studies, John Lott and David Mustard present evidence that when ordinary citizens are allowed to carry concealed weapons, some forms of crime drop. The argument that guns reduce crime is not new. Gun lobbies have been using the purported connected for quite some time now and gun manufacturers have been using it to sell product, though as of 2001 the public was unconvinced. John Lott then went on to publish, in 2000, a book titled “More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws” in which the same arguments are presented to a more lay audience. His book also incorporates some responses to critics. That book is probably the single most cited source in arguments in favor of concealed carry legislation, and could possibly change the public perception of gun control.
Now…
Take a look at this from Gun-Nuttery. Take your time. Watch it through. Think about it.
Then take a look at this.
The nation’s homicide rate rose slightly last year but the number of robberies skyrocketed by 6 percent, preliminary FBI data released today show.
The statistics were part of an overall 1.3 percent rise in violent crime across the country in 2006 - the second straight annual increase.
And another summary of the same report.
The annual report released Monday by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) showed that violent crime — murder, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault — rose by 1.3 per cent between January and December of 2006, after a 2.3 per cent increase in 2005. Robberies were up a steep six percent.
This can’t be? Something isn’t adding up. If, in fact, an armed citizenry means falling crime rates and if more and more states are going gun, then shouldn’t the numbers be dropping? Something must be wrong. Most of the country is now “shall issue”. Surely crime ought not be going up?
Lott and Mustard’s numbers have been criticized, and Lott, in particular, has put effort into responding. I don’t intend to get into that debate directly, but a page maintained by David Friedman is a good source for those interested. Unfortunately, a number of links are broken, including the link to the Lott and Mustard article in The Journal of Legal Studies, but this looks like a suitable substitute. Lott has also been criticized for data fabrication and other questionable behavior, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that all of his work is tainted by the same things. Again, information on those issues can be found at Friedman’s site, including Lott’s responses.
What I decided to do was get a broad look at crime statistics and see what I could see, constructing a kind of in-kind response not to Lott but to the multitude of sites online that defend concealed carry legislation by reference to these and similar raw crime statistics. So I scratched up some numbers for the US (1960-2005). I pulled up the numbers for Texas, because I grew up there and because it has had concealed carry legislation in place for more than ten years now. I pulled up Colorado because I live there now. I pulled up Oregon because it has had concealed carry legislation in place for more than a decade and a half. I pulled up Alaska and Vermont because gun ownership in those states is ‘unrestricted’, and I pulled up Illinois and Wisconsin because they are the only ‘no-issue’ states on the Gun-Nuttery map. I pulled Florida as well, since the success of its CCW laws is often cited.
I looked at Texas first. The first thing I noticed was that crime rates across the board drifted upwards year after year, on average, from 1960 through the 70s and early 80s and then started to drift downward with a short spike in the late 80s, roughly, before drifting downward again. This turned out to be true, roughly, across all the states I examined. These murder trends show something similar, as does this graph at Minneapolisfed.org.
This fall-off occurs, with approximately the same timing, in states with CCW laws, in states without such laws, and in the two ‘unrestricted’ states; which casts some doubt upon claims that the drop in crime might be due to an increase in the carrying of concealed weapons.
Next, I compared the crime indexes for Wisconsin, Illinois, Alaska, and Vermont. The first two states have no concealed carry laws. The latter two states have no restrictions on concealed carrying. All four states have crime rates that follow pretty much the same pattern, though in no case can the change be attributed to the passage of concealed weapons laws. Two of the states have never had CCW laws, and two have not allowed concealed weapons during the period investigated, so again there is a disconnect between the drop in crime and CCW legislation.
In Texas, it is true that crime rates have fallen fairly consistently year after year since the enactment of its CCW laws, but that decline had started across the board several years before the passage of those laws. In the cases of burglary and larceny that decline began six or seven years prior to that passage.
Oregon enacted CCW legislation a few years after its high crime mark in 1986 and thus a few years into a general decline in crime rates. It is really no surprise that the rates continued to fall.
Florida a bit more interesting. It enacted its CCW legislation a year or two before it saw its high crime mark in the late 80s. Consequently, Florida’s crime rates rose for several years after the enactment of CCW legislation and did not drift down to pre-CCW levels until six or seven years after the passing of the laws. In the particular case of violent crime it took about a decade to reach those levels. Forcible rape, aggravated assault, and vehicle theft stayed high for a decade or longer.
Finally and for good measure, I took a look at Washington, DC fully expecting to find the legendary increase in crime following its 1970s gun ban. Did I find this epic spike? Nope. The dramatic increase is crime, mentioned more places than I can count, turns out to be a bit elusive. What do I see? Crime rates drift upward through the seventies, peak in the early 80s, then drop some but rise again into the 90s. DC hits another high in 95– anomalously late, but not critically so. Nothing very surprising. The average rate for murder for the ten years before the ban is very close to the average for the ten years after. The average of the rates for forcible rape drops from 72.68 for the ten years before the ban to 63.01 for the ten years after. The same average for robbery goes down by about 29. The overall index does go up by about 525 though, which less than some of DC’s one year jumps.
In short, I see very little to justify the statement that more guns equals less crime, much as is concluded in a study in Homicide Studies. It looks like that at best one could argue that CCW laws might not make things worse, though though a few studies call that into question as well. The case certainly can’t be made by looking at raw statistics the way that so many gun proponents on the web do. The case would have to be made using more complicated techniques, much as Lott attempted, but time has not been kind to his thesis.
Still, economists like Stanford’s John Donohue and Georgetown’s Jens Ludwig say that when first published in 1997, Lott’s work was novel and even cutting edge. But the intervening years — and increased scholarly scrutiny — have not been kind to the “More Guns, Less Crime” idea. In fact, social scientists have turned away from the thesis even as Lott has stuck by his original conclusions. As a result, to maintain his argument Lott has had to go to considerable lengths, as demonstrated by a recent brouhaha over a massive critique of his work in the Stanford Law Review.
Some, like Ted Goertzel of Rutgers University, are not kind even to the whole field of econometric modeling, which provides the tools Lott and many others use.
Popularity: 1%
