Update on the More Guns, Less Crime Debate
I previously posted on the Carlisle Moody and Thomas Marvell rebuttal to a 2003 article by Ayres and Donohue on the debate over the link between shall issue gun permit laws and crime. An alert reader has given me the link to the soon-to-be published Ayres and Donohue reply to Moody and Marvell, which I link here.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Update on the More Guns, Less Crime Debate
- Rebuttal of Ayres and Donohue Claim of "More Guns, More Crime"
What is the mechanism that Moody and Marvell see to explain their results? The number of crimes committed by permit holders is very low, so they must be talking about some other effect that I don't understand.
Some of this effort smacks me as continuing to do studies until you get a result you like.
You're right, I think. I think all the papers have tended to focus on dummy variables representing legislative changes, and not the number of permit holders. Others will comment with much more knowledge, but my memory is that the policy effect is a dummy variable based on the assumption that the passage of the law is exogenous to underlying preferences of gun ownership.
One thing I didn't understand was that in the Marvell and Moody paper from Econ Journal Watch, which I thought for sure Ayres and Donahue would address, they used lagged dependent variables in a panel framework, which is known to be either biased or inconsistent (I forget which). Aren't you technically supposed to use the Arrelano-Bond dynamic GMM estimator if you're going to have lagged dependent variables on the right hand side for a panel? Is there an econometrician in the house who can answer that question?
I don't have any trouble believing that increased CCW permits might have no measurable effects on crime. I still think they are a good idea, but I could be convinced the effect on crime is zero.
But the authors claim crime goes up, and not just handgun crime, but ALL crime. Even property crime. I just don't see how it is possible that an increase in persons with CCW permits could cause an increase in property crimes. And that makes me dubious of their whole study. But maybe I am missing something.
Virginia passed 'shall issue' legislation that didn't change the license numbers at all. [Similar to fake post-Kelo reforms] Two years after that, Virginia modified the law to near shall issue, and two or three years later got he law so that CCW could not be arbitrarily denied.
When pointed out, Lambert claimed that the crux was the law, not the numbers. Virginia passed a 'shall issue' law and that was that. Technically, that may have been underlying Lott's original thesis in 'More Guns Less Crime'.
It soured me on Lambert as he was deliberately and intentionally misleading. He doesn't care about reality on the ground, it was all about winning technical points to drive a political agenda.
A. More gun permits mean more guns in circulation means more gun crimes; OR
B. More concealed weapon permits sow doubt in the minds of criminals, leading to a decrease in crime.
"Open carry" would, I think, have virtually no deterrent effect for the general population - since the criminal still knows exactly who is unarmed.
In other words, I think "open carry" provides an excellent statistical control group when looking at the benefits of concealed carry.
In fact, it looks like we are going to get an opportunity to test this, as Los Angeles is now allows open carry!
This means that proponents of CCW cannot claim population-level shifts in crime as a benefit, and opponents cannot support past hysterical assertions about blood in the streets and wild west shootouts. This is a remarkable shift.
I am suspicious of a lot of these studies - they suffer the same problem as a lot of epidemiological studies - too many uncontrolled confounding variables.
Just as at least some (if not all)( of the crime drop in the '90s was due to demographics and more imprisonment, the rise since then may also be demographically related.
Besides, how do you measure the benefit of feeling safter because you are armed?
Lee, Wang-Sheng; &Suardi, Sandy (2008-8). "The Australian Firearms Buyback and Its Effect on Gun Deaths". Melbourne Institute Working Paper No. 17/08 (Melbourne Institute): 28. ISBN 978-0-7340-3285-0. http://www.melbourneinstitute.com/wp/wp2008n17.pdf )
There is one far more interesting result: no major massacres in that period. The only causation model that adequately explains that result is the contagion effect model as mentioned by Kopel in http://volokh.com/posts/1197751278.shtml . Since this must lead to the conclusion that media and activist efforts may have contributed to motive formation of the perpetrators, I do not expect this idea to fly in public! Nevertheless the evidence is there, eg in the references:
Mullen, Paul quoted in Hannon K 1997, “Copycats to Blame for Massacres Says Expert”, Courier Mail, 4/3/1997
Cantor, Mullen and Alpers, 2000 Mass homicide: the civil massacre. J Am Acad Psychiatry Law 28:1:55-63.
Benefit-cost analysis of gun control measures is seriously needed, but there is little enough clean research without us pro-gun types making things up about it.
I'm no biker and I make it a point to carry openly a few times a year, just to remind my fellow citizens of their rights.
Which leads to a question for the opponents of "shall issue". If we assume that Ayres and Donohue are correct, the effect of these restrictions is so small as to be almost unobservable.
Why are we jailing people to produce almost no beneficial effect?
Ayers and Donohue have shown that opposition to "shall issue" can not be justified on a "crime control" basis. So, what is the justification?
According to the Bitish Home Office, I bet they are.
Sourced from gun facts
If you have a comment about spelling, typos, or format errors, please e-mail the poster directly rather than posting a comment.
Comment Policy: We reserve the right to edit or delete comments, and in extreme cases to ban commenters, at our discretion. Comments must be relevant and civil (and, especially, free of name-calling). We think of comment threads like dinner parties at our homes. If you make the party unpleasant for us or for others, we'd rather you went elsewhere. We're happy to see a wide range of viewpoints, but we want all of them to be expressed as politely as possible.
We realize that such a comment policy can never be evenly enforced, because we can't possibly monitor every comment equally well. Hundreds of comments are posted every day here, and we don't read them all. Those we read, we read with different degrees of attention, and in different moods. We try to be fair, but we make no promises.
And remember, it's a big Internet. If you think we were mistaken in removing your post (or, in extreme cases, in removing you) -- or if you prefer a more free-for-all approach -- there are surely plenty of ways you can still get your views out.