Guns Don't Kill People, People Kill People by Dennis A Henigan

Author:Dennis A Henigan [Henigan, Dennis A]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780807088852
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2016-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

MORE GUNS, A LOTT OF CRIME

The August 2, 1996, edition of USA Today, with the headline “Fewer Rapes, Killings Found Where Concealed Guns Legal,” reported the results of a new “comprehensive” study showing that “shall issue” concealed-carry laws were associated with substantial decreases in homicides, rapes, and aggravated assaults. The study, by economists John Lott and David Mustard, was imposing indeed; it analyzed crime statistics in the nation’s 3,054 counties from 1977 to 1992. The Lott-Mustard study made the remarkable claim that had all states adopted “shall issue” laws by 1992, 1,500 murders would have been avoided annually, along with 4,000 rapes, 11,000 robberies, and 60,000 aggravated assaults.59 Lott then published a book based on his study, audaciously entitled More Guns, Less Crime.

The Lott study was an adrenaline shot for the NRA’s concealed-weapons campaign. For the first time, the gun lobby and its allies could give a quasi-scholarly veneer to its claim that criminals would be deterred by the fear of gun-carrying law-abiding citizens. From the beginning, other researchers found Lott’s work deeply flawed. As with Kleck’s estimate of defensive gun uses, there has been a feeding frenzy of scholarly criticism. More than a dozen researchers have attacked Lott’s methodology and his conclusions.60

Lott’s study is essentially a comparison of crime rates in the states that adopted “shall issue” laws between 1985 and 1992 with those in the states that did not. As multiple scholars have pointed out, the core problem with the study is that the ten states Lott studied that enacted “shall-issue” laws during those years were states like Maine, West Virginia, Mississippi, Montana, and Virginia, which are more rural than the states that did not adopt those laws, like New York, New Jersey, California, and Illinois. Lott’s study also encompasses a period when a wave of violent crime, particularly homicide, was sweeping the nation. This wave, most criminologists agree, was fueled by the crack-cocaine epidemic, and it was concentrated among adolescents and young adults in urban areas. That crime wave peaked in 1993 (with, as we have seen, gun crime peaking in 1994).

If we look at later years, when the urban crime wave receded and violent crime began to plummet nationally, we see a very different story emerge about the “shall issue” CCW states. Lott’s study period ended in 1992. From 1992 to 1998, violent crime began an impressive decline nationally, and the violent-crime rate in the states that did not adopt “shall issue” laws fell twice as fast as in the “shall issue” states.61

The work of Stanford University economist John Donahue is perhaps the most devastating to Lott. Donahue simply extended Lott’s statistical model through 1997, a period during which thirteen additional states, relying in part on Lott’s study, adopted “shall-issue” laws. Donahue found that “shall-issue laws were uniformly associated with crime increases.”62 This helps to explain why, during a period of generally decreasing violent crime in the 1990s, the states with “shall-issue” laws lagged behind the other states in fighting crime. Donahue and Yale Law School’s

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