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

Finally, there are several unrefereed papers by Ian Ayres and John Donohue. For a response to their 1999 paper, see my book More Guns, Less Crime, Chapter 9. For their 2003 Stanford Law Review paper, see Plassmann and Whitlely’s piece in the same law review. Plassmann and Whitley point to a number of misleading figures from Ayres and Donohue (there was no increase in crime for in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth years after the right-to-carry laws were in effect, and the only appearance of an increase was an artifact of them dropping states out of their sample). Also in the Ayres and Donohue paper state by state regression results are an artifact of them limiting the time period to five years and fitting a line and an intercept shift to nonlinear data. See Ian Ayres and John Donohue, “Nondiscretionary Concealed Weapons Laws,” American Law and Economics Review, Fall 1999, 436-470. Florenz Plassmann and John Whitley Confirming ‘More Guns, Less Crime,’” Stanford Law Review, 2003, 1313-1369, http://johnrlott.tripod.com/Plassmann_Whitley.pdf. Ian Ayres and John Donohue, “Shooting Down the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis,” Stanford Law Review, 2003. While their American Law and Economics Review piece simply argues that the evidence that right-to-carry laws reduce crime is weak, the final conclusion of their other paper is more ambiguous. I am relying on Donohue’s statement that “his own research shows that concealed carry laws have a negligible effect on crime either way. ‘We’re still not sure what the true impact is. It’s very easy to get it wrong.’” See Erin Grace, “Concealed-carry absolutes are a moving target,” Omaha World-Herald (Nebraska), July 16, 2006.

99 Another quarter of the drop in crime is explained by changing economic factors such as the male unemployment rate, non-college educated male wages, and family income. See Eric Gould, Bruce Weinberg, and David Mustard, “Crime Rates and Local Labor Market Opportunities in the United States: 1979-1997,” Review of Economics and Statistics, February 2002: 57, fn. 35.

100 For the very oldest ages the graph is affected somewhat because there are fewer people in those age categories. This really doesn’t make much difference until you get to around 60 years of age, and the number of criminals in that age group is so small that making the adjustments would not make much of a difference.

101 One of the more important, politically incorrect books on crime is Wilson and Hernstein’s Crime and Human Nature, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. The book postulated and provided evidence that certain broad groups of people are more likely to engage in crime.

102 See Table 2.7 in “Murder - Crime in the United States, 2004,” Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, February 17, 2006 (http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/offenses_reported/violent_crime/murder.html).

103 Transcript from CNN’s American Morning, September 8, 2004 (http://transcripts. cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0409/08/ltm.05.html).

104 John R. Lott, Jr., “Hype and Reality,” Washington Times, October 28, 2005.

105 In contrast, during the same months in 2003 the murder rate fell only 1 percent.

106 Christopher S. Koper and Jeffrey A. Roth. 2002, An Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets, 1994-2000. Unpublished interim report to the National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute. See also Christopher S. Koper, 2004. An Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994-2003. Report NCJ-204431 to the National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice. Philadelphia: Jerry Lee Center of Criminology, University of Pennsylvania. Available electronically from the Jerry Lee Center (www.sas.upenn.edu/jerrylee/research.htm) and the National Criminal Justice Reference Service (www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/grants/204431.pdf).

107 James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, “Broken Windows,” The Atlantic Monthly, March 1982.

108 Brian A. Reaves and Matthew Hickman, “Police Departments in Large Cities, 1990-2000,” Bureau of Justice Statistics, Department of Justice, May 2002 (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/pdlc00.pdf).

109 Bureau of Justice Statistics, “1985-1997 Homicide and population data for cities with population of 100,000 and over in 1997,” FBI, Uniform Crime Reports (http://www.hopemcc.org/data/lgcithom.htm) and FBI Uniform Crime Reports for 2000 (http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/00cius.htm).

110 Reaves and Hickman, 5 and 13-14.

111 Patrick A. Langan and Matthew Durose, “The Remarkable Drop in Crime in New York City,” Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice, October 21, 2004, Appendix table 3. The number of police in New York City peaked in 1999 at 41,791. Earlier numbers underreported the change in the number of sworn full-time police officers. See Brian A. Reaves and Matthew Hickman, “Police Departments in Large Cities, 1990-2000,” Bureau of Justice Statistics, Department of Justice, May 2002. Large cities are defined as those with over 250,000 people (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/pdlc00.pdf). See also Bruce Frankel, “Ex-NYC officer tells stark tale of cops gone bad,” USA Today, September 28, 1993, 3A.

112 Reaves and Hickman. If I used the NYPD numbers provided by Reaves and Hickman showing that the number of sworn full-time police officers went from 31,236 in 1990 to 40,435 by 2000, the per capita increase in New York’s police force is still almost three times greater than that for other large cities.

113 John R. Lott, Jr., “Does a Helping hand Put Others At Risk?: Affirmative Action, Police Departments, and Crime,” Economic Inquiry, vol. 38, no. 2 (April 2000): 241.

114 John Marzulli and David L. Lewis, “Cop Hopefuls Face Chase Test to Mimic Run After Suspect,” New York Daily News, March 12, 1997, 7.

115 Ibid.

116 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.

117 Lance Lochner, “Perceptions of the Criminal Justice System,” University of Western Ontario Working Paper, January 2003.

118 John Lott, More Guns, Less Crime (University of Chicago Press, 2000), Chapter 9, 190-4. Other policies analyzed