The reference to John Lott's work offered by George led me to a Brookings paper which examines the Lott thesis and offers reasons that the "shall-issue" laws, a new one for me, lead to an increase in crime rather than a decrease.
You can find the paper here: brookings.edu
The author is John Donahue of Stanford. It includes his paper, plus a response by David Mustard, who is one of John Lott's co-authors, and by someone named Willard Manning.
There is clearly a serious literature here, involving rather arcane mathematics. Anyone who wishes to dig around is welcome.
Here's the summary of Donahue's argument.
Although the discussion of the approach used by and problems with the work of Lott and Mustard can get technical, the points can be summarized in a more intuitive fashion. First, their initial analysis compares the changes in crime in ten states that passed shall-issue laws between 1985 and 1991, including states like Maine, West Virginia, Idaho, and Montana, with states that did not, such as New York, California, Illinois, and New Jersey. However, I suspect the changes in crime in the late 1980s were quite different in these two groups for reasons that had nothing to do with the shall-issue laws, but rather with the criminogenic influence of the new crack cocaine trade in more urban, poor inner city areas (most commonly found in states that did not adopt shall-issue laws). If this suspicion is true, then the relatively smaller crime increases in adopting states over this period would be incorrectly attributed to the law when wholly separate forces were really the explanation.
Second, because the adoption of shall-issue laws does not occur randomly across states and over time, it is harder to discern the impact of the law (just as a randomized medical experiment to determine the effectiveness of a drug will provide better guidance than merely observing who chooses to take the drug and what happens to those who do and do not). Since there is evidence of a “treatment effect” even before the laws are adopted, one needs to be cautious in drawing conclusions about the actual effect of the shall-issue laws. This concern is heightened by fears that spikes in crime encourage the adoption of shall-issue laws, and then the accompanying drops in crime (representing a return to more normal times or “regression to the mean”) will be inaccurately attributed to the passage of the law. When the Lott and Mustard statistical model is run for the period in the 1990s when the spikes in crime reversed themselves, suddenly shall-issue laws are associated with uniform increases in crime. Thus, with the benefit of five more years of data, during which time thirteen states and the city of Philadelphia adopted shall-issue laws, one sees very different patterns than what Lott and Mustard observed in their initial study on ten adopting states with dates ending in 1992.
With the expanded data set, there is much evidence that could be amassed to support the view that shall-issue laws tend to increase crime, at least in most states. But the third set of factors that undermines the more-guns, less-crime hypothesis
probably weakens that conclusion too: the results tend to be sensitive to whether one uses county or state data, which time period one looks at, and what statistical method one employs. While scholars may be able to sort out some of the disputes about coding adoption dates for shall-issue laws, which when corrected tend to modestly weaken the Lott and Mustard results, there are still uncertainties about data quality and model specification that may not easily be resolved with the current aggregated crime data. In the end, the most that can be said is that when adopted in the states that have so far adopted them, shall-issue laws may not increase crime as much as many feared. But these laws still may create social unease if citizens are apprehensive that even greater numbers of individuals walking through shopping malls, schools, and churches and sitting in movie theatres are carrying lethal weapons.
Lott and Mustard emphasize that few holders of gun permits are found to have committed murder, but they fail to recognize that the number of murders can rise from the passage of shall-issue laws, even if no permit holder ever commits a crime. First, knowing that members of the public are armed may encourage criminals to carry guns and use them more quickly, resulting in more felony murders. Second, as already mentioned, the massive theft of guns each year means that anything that increases the number of guns in America will likely increase the flow of guns into the hands of criminals, who may use them to commit murders. Notably, the typical gun permit holder is a middle-aged Republican white male, which is a group at relatively low risk of violent criminal victimization with or without gun ownership, so it is not clear whether substantial crime reduction benefits are likely to occur by arming this group further. |
