More Guns Less Crime John Jr (accelerated reader books .txt) 📖

a whole would be no better off with these laws, even if individual jurisdictions benefited. While the evidence would confirm the importance of deterrence, adopting such a law in a single state might have a greater deterrent impact than if the entire nation adopted the law. The deterrent effect of adopting nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws in additional states could also decline as more states adopted the laws.

To investigate these issues, I reran the regressions reported in table 4.1, using only those counties that were within fifty miles of counties in neighboring states. In addition to the variable that examines whether your own state has a nondiscretionary concealed-handgun law, I added three new variables. One variable averages the dummy variables for whether adjacent counties in neighboring counties have such laws. A second variable examines what happens when your county and your neighboring county adopt these laws. Finally, the neighboring counties' arrest rates are added, though I do not bother reporting them, because the evidence indicates that only the arrest rates in your own county, not your neighboring counties, matter in determining your crime rate.

The results reported in table 4.14 confirm that deterrent effects do spill over into neighboring areas. For all the violent-crime categories, adopting a concealed-handgun law reduces the number of violent crimes in your county, but these results also show that criminals who commit murder, rape, and robbery apparently move to adjacent states without the laws. The one violent-crime category that does not fit this pattern is aggravated assault: adopting a nondiscretionary concealed-handgun law lowers the number of aggravated assaults in neighboring counties. With respect to the benefits of all counties adopting the laws, the last column

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Table 4.14 Estimates of the impact of nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws on neighboring counties

shows that all categories of violent crime are reduced the most when all counties adopt such laws. The results imply that murder rates decline by over 8 percent and aggravated assaults by around 21 percent when a county and its neighbors adopt concealed-handgun laws.

As a final test, I generated the figures showing crime trends before and after a neighbor's adoption of the law by the method previously used, in addition to the time trends for before and after one's own adoption of the concealed-handgun laws. The use of an additional squared term allows us to see if the effect on crime is not linear. Figures 4.10—4.13 provide a graphic display of the findings for the different violent-crime categories, though the results for the individual violent-crime categories are equally dramatic. In all violent-crime categories, the adoption of concealed-handgun laws produces an immediate and large increase in violent-crime rates in neighboring counties, and in all the categories except aggravated assaults the spillover increases over time just as the counties with the nondiscretionary law see their own crime rates continue to fall. The symmetry and timing between the reduction in counties with nondiscretionary laws and increases in neighboring counties without the laws is striking.

Overall, these results provide strong additional evidence for the deterrent effect of nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws. They imply that the earlier estimate of the total social benefit from these laws may have overestimated the initial benefits, but underestimated the long-term

-2-101234 Years before and after the neighbor's adoption of the law

Figure 4.10. Impact on murder rate from a neighbor's adoption of nondiscretionary concealed-handgun law

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Years before and after the neighbor's adoption of the law

Figure 4.11. Impact on robbery rate from a neighbor's adoption of nondiscretionary concealed-handgun law

t 1 3g ' H 1 1 1 r

-2-101234 Years before and after the neighbor's adoption of the law

Figure 4.12. Impact on rape rate from a neighbor's adoption of nondiscretionary concealed-handgun law

i l i i

-10 12 3 4

Years before and after the neighbor's adoption of the law

Figure 4.13. Impact on aggravated assault rate from a neighbor's adoption of nondiscretionary concealed-handgun law

benefits as more states adopt these laws. In the long run, the negative spillover effect subsides, and the adoption of these laws in all neighboring states has the greatest deterrent effect on crime.

Conclusions

The empirical work provides strong evidence that concealed-handgun laws reduce violent crime and that higher arrest rates deter all types of crime. The results confirm what law-enforcement officials have said— that nondiscretionary laws cause a greatest change in the number of permits issued for concealed handguns in the most populous, urbanized counties. This provides additional support for the claim that the greatest declines in crime rates are related to the greatest increases in concealed-handgun permits. The impact of concealed-handgun laws varies with a

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county's level of crime, its population and population density, its per-capita income, and the percentage of the population that is black. Despite the opposition to these laws in large, urban, densely populated areas, those are the areas that benefit the most from the laws. Minorities and women tend to be the ones with the most to gain from being allowed to protect themselves.

Some of the broader issues concerning criminal deterrence discussed in chapter 1 were evaluated, and the hypotheses used produced information about the locations where increased police efforts had the most significant deterrent effects on crime. Splitting the data set into high-and low-crime counties shows that arrest rates do not affect crime rates equally in all counties: the greatest return to increasing arrest rates is in the most crime-prone areas.

The results also confirm some of the potential aggregation problems with state-level data. The county-level data explain about six times more variation in violent-crime rates and eight times more variation in property-crime rates than do state-level data. Generally, the effect of concealed-handgun laws on crime appeared much greater when state-level regressions were estimated. However, one conclusion is clear: the very different results for state- and county-level data should make us very cautious in aggregating crime data.