Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't John Jr. (the dot read aloud .txt) 📖

87 Some gun control advocates, however, continue to deny this. For example, Douglas Weil, while he was with Handgun Control (now called the Brady Campaign), claimed: “In states with lax CCW [Concealed Carry Weapons] laws, hundreds of licensees have committed crimes both before and after their licensure. For example, in Texas, which weakened its CCW law in 1996, the Department of Public Safety reported that felony and misdemeanor cases involving CCW permit holders rose 54.4% between 1996 and 1997.” (Douglas Weil, “Carrying Concealed Guns is Not the Solution,” Intellectualcapital.com, March 26, 1998). This is indeed true, but Weil fails to mention that the number of permits also increased by 50 percent between those two years, thus keeping the rate at which permit holders were arrested virtually unchanged. Texas permit holders actually tend to be quite law-abiding compared to the rest of the population, with just 180 out of 225,000 convicted of a misdemeanor or felony in 2001 (http://www.txdps.state.tx.us/administration/crime_records/chl/convrates.htm). For a more extensive debunking of these and other faulty claims of gun control advocates, see Chapter 9 of my book, More Guns, Less Crime (2000).

88 Florida Department of Agricultural and Consumer Services, Concealed Weapon / Firearm Summary Report, October 1, 1987 - November 30, 2006 (http://licgweb.doacs.state.fl.us/stats/cw_monthly.html). See also More Guns, Less Crime (2000), 221.

89 Telephone interview with Ms. Mary Kennedy of the Florida Department of Agricultural and Consumer Services, Concealed Weapon / Firearm Division during February 2007.

90 Jonathan Rauch, “And Don’t Forget Your Gun,” National Journal, March 20, 1999.

91 Http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/cvict.htm.

92 Brian Blasé, “The National Crime Victimization Survey,” November 27, 2005, http://johnrlott.tripod.com/other/NCVS.html.

93 Stephen Bronars and John R. Lott, Jr., “Deterrence, Right-to-Carry Concealed Handgun Laws, and the Geographic Displacement of Crime,” American Economic Review, May 1998, 475-479.

94 Lott, More Guns, Less Crime, Ch. 9.

95 See Lott, More Guns, Less Crime, 110-113.

96 Mark Duggan, “More Guns, More Crime,” Journal of Political Economy, 2001, 1110.

97 Carlisle E. Moody and Thomas B. Marvel, “Guns and Crime,” Southern Economic Journal, 2005, 720-736. Duggan uses some creative methods to reach his conclusion that lawful gun ownership increases crime. For example, he estimates gun ownership by measuring sales of Guns&Ammo, the fourth biggest-selling gun magazine. Unfortunately, his result only holds true for a single magazine whose unusual sales practices skew the resultes. Skip Johnson, a vice president for Guns&Ammo’s and Handguns Magazine’s parent company, Primedia, told me that between 5 and 20 percent of Guns&Ammo’s national sales in a particular year were purchases by his own company to meet its guaranteed sales to advertisers. These copies were given away for free in places like dentists’ and doctors’ offices. Because the purchases were meant to offset any unexpected national declines in sales, Johnson said that his own purchases were very selective and produced very large swings in a relatively small number of counties. More importantly, while a precise breakdown of how these free samples are counted toward the sales in different counties is not available, these self-purchases were apparently related to factors that helped explain why people might purchase guns, and these factors included changing crime rates. Johnson indicated that the issue of self-purchases is particularly important for Guns&Ammo because the magazine had declining sales over part of this period. See also Peter Kennedy’s example 20. Peter E. Kennedy, “Oh No! I Got the Wrong Sign: What Should I Do?” Journal of Economic Education, 36(1) (Winter 2005): 77-92.

98 Another skeptical study by Dan Black and Dan Nagin disregarded all counties with fewer than 100,000 people, as well as the entire state of Florida, but still found drops in robberies and aggravated assaults attributable to right-to-carry laws. See Dan A. Black and Daniel S. Nagin, “Do Right-to-Carry Laws Deter Violent Crime?” Journal of Legal Studies (January 1998): 212. The drop in robbery was statistically significant at 6 percent.

Jens Ludwig dismissed as an anomaly his own findings of decreasing crime rates connected to the passage of right-to-carry laws because crime fell against both juveniles and adults, even though only adults are allowed to carry concealed handguns. An earlier study I co-authored with David Mustard explained this same result by noting that both age groups benefit when the passage of right-to-carry laws results in criminals leaving an area, or in the protection of juveniles by adults with right-to-carry permits.See David Mustard and I found the same result (Journal of Legal Studies, 1997, 51), but we also offered explanations for it that Ludwig never investigated. See Jens Ludwig, “Concealed Gun Carrying Laws and Violent Crime: Evidence from State Panel Data,” International Review of Law and Economics , November 1998, and John Lott and David Mustard, “Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to-carry Concealed Handguns,” Journal of Legal Studies (1997): 51. Similar problems are found in the other major studies denying that right-to-carry laws reduce crime rates. Duwe, Kovandzic, and Moody claim to find no statistically significant impact of right-to-carry laws on multiple victim public shootings, though they only examine the very small set of cases where four or more people were killed in attacks. Indeed, while the original work that I did with Bill Landes found significant drops in crime when we examined two or more people killed or three or more people killed, we also did not find a statistically significant result for one type of specification when we looked at only four or more people killed (Lott, The Bias Against Guns, 307, fn. 61). See Grant Duwe, Tomislave Kovandzic, and Carlisle E. Moody, “The Impact of Right-to-Carry Concealed Firearm Laws on Mass Public Shootings,” Homicide Studies, (November 2002): 271-296. The work by Dezhbakhsh and Rubin is discussed in my book More Guns, Less Crime (302, and 304). See also Hashem Dezhbakhsh and Paul H. Rubin, “The Effect of Concealed Handgun Laws