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More Guns, Less Crime

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More Guns, Less Crime is a book by John R. Lott Jr. that says violent crime rates go down when states pass "shall issue" concealed carry laws. He presents the results of his statistical analysis of crime data for every county in the United States during 29 years from 1977 to 2005. Each edition of the book was refereed by the University of Chicago Press. As of 2019, the book is no longer published by the University of Chicago Press. The book examines city, county and state level data from the entire United States and measures the impact of 13 different types of gun control laws on crime rates. The book expands on an earlier study published in 1997 by Lott and his co-author David Mustard in The Journal of Legal Studies<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> and by Lott and his co-author John Whitley in The Journal of Law and Economics, October 2001.<ref name="Lott Jr. 659–689">Template:Cite journal Pdf.</ref>

Main topicsEdit

{{ safesubst:#invoke:Unsubst||date=__DATE__ |$B= {{ safesubst:#invoke:Unsubst||date=__DATE__ |$B= Template:Ambox }} }} Below are summaries of the main topics discussed in More Guns, Less Crime.

Shall issue lawsEdit

Lott examines the effects of shall issue laws on violent crime across the United States.

His conclusion is that shall issue laws, which allow citizens to carry concealed weapons, steadily decrease violent crime. He explains that this result makes sense because criminals are deterred by the risk of attacking an armed victim. As more citizens arm themselves, the danger to criminals increases.

Training requirementsEdit

Lott examines the effects of training requirements on crime rate and accident rate. He finds that training requirements have very little effect on both crime rates and accident rates.

Waiting periodsEdit

Lott examines the effects of waiting periods. These include limiting the time before purchasing a gun, and limiting the time before obtaining a concealed carry permit.

Brady LawEdit

Lott examines the effects of the Brady law.

"Stand Your Ground" and "Castle Doctrine" LawsEdit

The third edition of the book is the first study to examine Stand Your Ground and Castle Doctrine laws.

Other countriesEdit

The focus of the book is overwhelmingly on the US, but Lott does mention briefly gun ownership and crime rates in other countries, such as Great Britain, Ireland, and Jamaica, noting that murder rates rose after guns were banned. He also notes that many countries, such as Switzerland, Finland, New Zealand, and Israel, have high gun ownership rates and low crime rates, while many other countries have both low gun ownership rates and either high or low crime rates.

ReceptionEdit

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NRC ReportEdit

Partially in response to Lott's book, a sixteen-member panel of the United States National Research Council was convened to address the issue of whether right-to-carry laws influenced crime rate. In 2001 and 2002 they also looked at many other gun control measures, including the soon-to-expire 1994 Assault Weapon Ban scheduled for renewal in 2004, gun buy-backs, and bans on handgun possession or carry. In 2004 they issued the report "Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review" which examined Lott's statistical methods in detail, including computation of the statistical uncertainties involved, and wrote:

The committee found that answers to some of the most pressing questions cannot be addressed with existing data and research methods, however well designed. Indeed, the committee was unable to find any of the laws that it examined had any effect on crime or suicide rates. In the case of right-to-carry laws, despite a large body of research, the committee found no credible evidence that the passage of right-to-carry laws decreases or increases violent crime, and there is almost no empirical evidence that the more than 80 prevention programs focused on gun-related violence have had any effect on children's behavior, knowledge, attitudes, or beliefs about firearms. The committee found that the data available on these questions are too weak to support unambiguous conclusions or strong policy statements.<ref name=Firearms>Template:Cite book Template:ISBN (online book).</ref>

The council determined that Lott's data sets can be subject to manipulation given a number of factors, so that different studies produce different results. "While the trend models show a reduction in the crime growth rate following the adoption of right-to-carry laws, these trend reductions occur long after law adoption, casting serious doubt on the proposition that the trend models estimated in the literature reflect effects of the law change."<ref name=Firearms />

The issue of right-to-carry laws was the only law that drew a dissent from the committee's otherwise universal findings that it could not reach a conclusion. In a very unusual dissent for National Research Council reports, criminologist James Q. Wilson wrote that:

The direct evidence that such shooting sprees occur is nonexistent. The indirect evidence, as found in papers by Black and Nagin and Ayres and Donohue [cited in Chapter 6], is controversial. Indeed, the Ayres and Donohue paper shows that there was a "statistically significant downward shift in the trend" of the murder rate (Chapter 6, page 135). This suggests to me that for people interested in RTC laws, the best evidence we have is that they impose no costs but may confer benefits. ... In sum, I find that the evidence presented by Lott and his supporters suggests that RTC laws do in fact help drive down the murder rate, though their effect on other crimes is ambiguous.<ref>Template:Citation Template:ISBN (online book).</ref>

SupportEdit

A conference organized by the Center for Law, Economics, and Public Policy at Yale Law School and held at American Enterprise Institute was published in a special issue of The Journal of Law and Economics.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> Academics of all interests in the debate were invited to participate and provide refereed empirical research.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }} Clarifying comments on the JLE conference issue.</ref> As follows are some papers from that conference supported Lott's conclusions.<ref>Template:Cite journal Pdf.</ref>

Other refereed empirical academic studies besides the original paper with David Mustard that have supported Lott's conclusions include the following.

  • William Alan Bartley and Mark A. Cohen, Vanderbilt University, "The Effect of Concealed Weapons Laws: An Extreme Bound Analysis", Economic Inquiry, 1998.<ref>Template:Cite journal Pdf.</ref>
  • Stephen G. Bronars, University of Texas, and John R. Lott, Jr., "Criminal Deterrence, Geographic Spillovers, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns", American Economic Review, May 1998.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
  • John R. Lott, Jr and John Whitley, University of Adelaide, "Abortion and Crime: Unwanted Children and Out-of-Wedlock Births," Economic Inquiry, April 2007.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
  • John R. Lott, Jr and John Whitley, University of Adelaide, "A Note on the Use of County-Level UCR Data," Journal of Quantitative Criminology, October 2001.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
  • Florenz Plassmann, State University of New York at Binghamton, and John Whitley, University of Adelaide, 'Confirming "More Guns, Less Crime"', Stanford Law Review, 2003.<ref>Template:Cite journal Pdf.</ref>
  • Eric Helland, Claremont-McKenna College and Alexander Tabarrok, George Mason University, 'Using Placebo Laws to Test "More Guns, Less Crime",' The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 2008.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
  • Carlisle E. Moody, College of William and Mary, and Thomas B. Marvell, Justec Research, "The Debate on Shall-Issue Laws", Econ Journal Watch, 2008.<ref>Template:Cite journal Pdf.</ref>
  • Carlisle E. Moody and Thomas B. Marvell, "The Debate on Shall-Issue Laws," Econ Journal Watch, September 2008 <ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
  • Carlisle E. Moody and Thomas B. Marvell, " On the Choice of Control Variables in the Crime Equation," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, October 2010<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
  • Carlisle E. Moody, Thomas B. Marvell, Paul R Zimmerman, and Fasil Alemante, "The Debate on Shall-Issue Laws," Review of Economics & Finance, 2014<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
  • Donald J. Lacombe and Amanda Ross, "Revisiting the Question 'More Guns, Less Crime?' New Estimates Using Spatial Econometric Techniques," Social Science Research Network, 2014.<ref>Template:Citation</ref>
  • Mark Gius, "An examination of the effects of concealed weapons laws and assault weapons bans on state-level murder rates," Applied Economics Letters, 2014.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

OppositionEdit

Some academic studies that have rejected Lott's conclusions include the following. Virtually all of these studies contend that there seems to be little or no effect on crime from the passage of license-to-carry laws. One by Ayres and Donohue, published in 2003, finds a temporary increase in aggravated assaults. The authors of the book Freakonomics report "troubling allegation that Lott actually invented some of the survey data that supports his theory"<ref>Freakonomics, p.84</ref> and that other scholars couldn’t replicate his results (a court later dismissed Lott's defamation claim against the authors).<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

EditionsEdit

There have been three editions of More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws, all published by University of Chicago Press. As of 2019, this book is no longer published by the University of Chicago Press:

See alsoEdit

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ReferencesEdit

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External linksEdit

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