By establishing passive cooperation as a standard operating procedure, an employer makes it known to the criminals that they can rob at will, and murder to avoid identification.
unclewest got it right. Train and arm the managers, and let it be known that they are then authorized to resist with all due force. The criminals would find other targets of opportunity. A good source of a scholarly look (i.e., dry, but thorough statistics by a PhD economist) at the effects of allowing honest citizens free access to their weapons of criminal destruction <g> is John R. Lott, Jr.'s book, More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws
---------------------------------------------
instantknowledgenews.com
review
Does allowing people to own or carry guns deter violent crime? Or does it cause more citizens to harm each other? Wherever people happen to fall along the ideological spectrum, their answers are all too often founded upon mere impressionistic and anecdotal evidence. In this direct challenge to conventional wisdom, legal scholar John Lott presents the most rigorously comprehensive data analysis ever done on crime. In this timely and provocative work he comes to a startling conclusion: more guns mean less crime.
Lott's sources are broad and inclusive, and his evidence the most extensive yet assembled, taking full account of the FBI's massive yearly crime figures for all 3,054 U.S. counties over eighteen years, the largest national surveys on gun ownership, as well as state police documents on illegal gun use. His unexpected findings reveal that many of the most commonly held assumptions about gun control and its crime-fighting efficacy are simply wrong. Waiting periods, gun buybacks, and background checks yield virtually no benefits in crime reduction. Instead, Lott argues, allowing law-abiding citizens to legal concealed handguns currently represents the most cost-effective methods available for reducing violent crime.
In what may be his most controversial conclusion, Lott finds that mass public shootings, such as the infamous examples of the Long Island Railroad by Colin Ferguson or the 1996 Empire State Building shooting, are dramatically reduced once law-abiding citizens in a state are allowed to carry concealed handguns.
Lott maintains that criminals generally respond to deterrence: as the risks and potential costs of criminal activity rise, criminals either commit fewer crimes or move on to other areas. The possibility of getting shot by somebody carrying a concealed weapon constitutes a substantial risk, and discourages any sort of physical confrontation. Accordingly, the states now experiencing the largest reductions in crime are also the ones with the fastest-growing rates of gun ownership. Evidence on accidental gun deaths and suicides is also examined. Thorough and enlightening, More Guns, Less Crime is required reading for anyone interested in the sometimes contentious, always critical American debate over gun control.
John R. Lott, Jr. teaches criminal deterrence and law and economics at the University of Chicago, where he is the John M. Olin Law and Economics Fellow. He was the chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission during 1988 and 1989. He has published over 70 articles in academic journals. This is his first book.
Amazon.com review
Multiple regression analyses are rarely the subject of heated public debate or 225-page books for laypeople. But John R. Lott, Jr.'s study in the January 1997 Journal of Legal Studies showing that concealed-carry weapons permits reduced the crime rate set off a firestorm. The updated study, together with illustrative anecdotes and a short description of the political and academic response to the study, as well as responses to the responses, makes up Lott's informative More Guns, Less Crime.
In retrospect, it perhaps should not have been surprising that increasing the number of civilians with guns would reduce crime rates. The possibility of armed victims reduces the expected benefits and increases the expected costs of criminal activity. And, at the margin at least, people respond to changes in costs, even for crime, as Nobel-Prize winning economist [TAG]Gary Becker showed long ago. Allusions to the preferences of criminals for unarmed victims have seeped into popular culture; Ringo, a British thug in Pulp Fiction, noted off-handedly why he avoided certain targets: "Bars, liquor stores, gas stations, you get your head blown off stickin' up one of them."
But Lott's actual quantification of this, in the largest and most comprehensive study of the effects of gun control to date, a study well-detailed in the book, provoked a number of attacks, ranging from the amateurish to the subtly misleading, desperate to discredit him. Lott takes the time to refute each argument; it's almost touching the way he footnotes each time he telephones an attacker who eventually hangs up on him without substantiating any of their claims.
Lott loses a little focus when he leaves his firm quantitative base; as an economist, he should know that the low number of rejected background checks under the Brady Bill doesn't demonstrate anything by itself, because some people may have been deterred from even undergoing the background check in the first place, but he attacks the bill on this ground anyway. But the conclusions that are backed by evidence--that concealed-weapons permits reduce crime, and do so at a lower cost to society than increasing the number of police or prisons--are important ones that should be considered by policymakers. --Ted Frank |
