maybe you should carry a gun
TUCKER, WILLIAM
Maybe You Should Carry a Handgun By William Tucker Like most people in America, I'm of two minds about gun control. To wit: Several years ago, my parents retired to a remote part of a southern...
...For a long time, I was consumed with lurid fears about their isolation ("If someone were just to come in and cut their telephone wires...
...So what is true...
...They concluded murders had actually gone up in Jacksonville, Jackson, and Tampa immediately after the laws went into effect...
...Whether that means the average citizen in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles would be better off packing a pistol is still an open question...
...Still, the NRA frequently cites the Florida experience in urging other states to follow suit...
...One person whose curiosity was piqued was John R. Lott, Jr., former chief economist at the U.S...
...The argument has been successful...
...Releasing a study purporting to show an increase in crimes committed with legal guns in Florida, VPC also revealed alleged "details of the firearms industry funding links behind the new study released by University of Chicago researcher John Lott, who claims that relaxed concealed weapons laws have the power to turn murderers and rapists into burglars...
...The debate over the effect of these new laws has now been enlivened by an impressive study from two University of Chicago economists, who say there has William Tucker is a writer living in Brooklyn...
...People are willing to tolerate anything from intrusion of school lockers to targeted searches because of their concerns about gun violence...
...On the other hand, in my Brooklyn neighborhood, there are confrontations almost every day...
...It's common sense," says Doug Weil, research director at the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, in Washington...
...A short while ago, right in front of my house, a 20-year-old hothead who bragged, "I'm from Jersey and I don't take this crap," got into a fight with my 75-year-old neighbor over a double-parked car...
...Would such laws have the same effect in the anonymous and permissive atmosphere of the cities—or would they just lead to more killings over parking spaces...
...The charges involved tortured logic: Lott happens to be a John M. Olin Law and Economics Fellow at the law school, which means his salary there comes from a grant by the John M. Olin Foundation, which in turn was endowed with profits that once came from the Olin Corporation, which among other businesses happens to own Winchester Ammunition, "the largest ammunition manufacturer in the U.S...
...A large number of these permits are being obtained by women," says Bill Powers, media relations coordinator of the NRA...
...The debate over right-to-carry is too ideological for dispassionate evidence to reign...
...I think theirs is a very careful piece of work—much better than anything that's been done before," he says...
...Across the five areas, firearms homicides increased in the aftermath of the shall issue laws," the authors wrote in a paper published by the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology...
...This may be evidence that right-to-carry laws have a delayed effect on crime, or that other factors occurring after the passage of right-to-carry laws affect the crime rate...
...But if you do, the Violence Policy Center doesn't want the police to be able to arrest you...
...The 1987 law shifted the burden of proof...
...In truth, the Chicago study is far more substantive than its critics want to allow...
...Or, as the National Rifle Association's slogan has it: "An armed society is a polite society...
...All of them were either time series in one city or cross-comparisons between cities...
...Lott was intrigued by the possibility of applying sophisticated statistical techniques to the question...
...4,177 rapes...
...Don't hold your breath...
...Interestingly, property crimes increased 3 percent, with burglaries up .5 percent, larceny up 3 percent, and auto theft up 7 percent...
...Their only dispute with Lott and Mustard is that the evidence shows "no consistent impact" on crime rates and that whatever impacts can be observed disappear when cities of more than 100,000 are included in the survey...
...Nor do Black and Nagin completely reject Lott and Mustard's conclusions...
...In 1995, David McDowall, Colin Loftin, and Brian Wiersema, of the Violence Research Group and the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland, tackled the issue...
...So what has happened...
...Predictably, all hell broke loose...
...We're not arguing from statistics," says Powers...
...This is one intellectual shoot-out that could use some better marksmen...
...Almost 200,000 Floridians, one in every 65 residents, now have three-year permits to carry a concealed weapon...
...I read a couple of the papers on gun control questions, and they seemed very weak," says Lott...
...There appears to be evidence of large effects on violent crimes, especially murders and rapes, that occur four or more years after adoption of the laws," they wrote...
...Criminals will carry weapons whether they have permission or not, but if ordinary citizens also can carry them, criminals will be more cautious—particularly in committing robberies or rapes...
...New York, Illinois, California, Massachusetts, and several other populous states will soon be debating laws that would allow most citizens to easily obtain permits to carry handguns...
...Had right-to-carry laws been adopted across the country in 1992, they speculated, "approximately 1,570 murders...
...It sounds to me as if the judge made a reasonable determination," says Josh Sugarmann, director of the Violence Policy Center...
...To the NRA it makes no difference...
...Lott and Mustard speculate that there was a "substitution effect"—that criminals, concerned about encountering armed victims, switched to burglary, larceny, and auto theft in search of quick cash...
...You're basically looking at places where crime rates were already low...
...They want to protect themselves...
...Felons frequently comment . . . that they avoid late-night burglaries because "that's the way to get shot...
...In other words, you shouldn't be allowed to carry a concealed handgun...
...Until then, Florida, like most states, gave considerable discretion to local officials to decide who got permits...
...Public concern about gun violence has led to an increasing tendency to sacrifice real Fourth Amendment rights for imaginary Second Amendment rights...
...If you take the Florida data out, the overall effect disappears...
...Weil also argued that Lott and Mustard had been refuted in a study by Dan Black and Daniel Nagin, at Carnegie Mellon University...
...This interpretation is consistent with other work showing that policies to discourage firearms in public may help prevent violence...
...The day Lott and Mustard presented their findings at a Cato Institute seminar in July, the Violence Policy Center, a Washington, D.C., anti-gun lobbying group, held its own press conference in Chicago...
...Did gun-control groups call a press conference announcing background checks into the financial interests of the judges...
...We believe the focus should instead be on handguns themselves and limiting their availability...
...Spurred by the National Rifle Association, the state legislature made it much easier to get a permit to carry a gun...
...To wit: Several years ago, my parents retired to a remote part of a southern state famous for its military traditions...
...The logic is simple...
...The five cities were apparently chosen arbitrarily...
...I separated them (not as hard as it sounds, since nobody really wanted to fight), but my neighbor felt compelled to go indoors and retrieve a homemade knife, which he brandished in the other man's face...
...No one knows...
...Et voila: Instead of a serious academic, Lott is really a salesman for the ammunitions industry...
...I resent people who claim that this study was not well done...
...Now if a person meets the basic requirements, local authorities must issue a license (this is called a "right-to-carry" or "shall-issue" law in the literature, as opposed to the "may-issue" law it replaced...
...On the other hand, laws like Florida's might be expected to increase bloodshed...
...This effect, the authors noted, was more pronounced in densely populated, high-crime counties than in low-crime rural areas...
...Thus, at a stroke, the ultra-liberal New York court effectively legalized the carrying of concealed weapons, no shall-issue laws required...
...About a dozen rural states quickly followed Florida's lead...
...At the very least, shall-issue laws appear to deter some crime, particularly in rural areas where community sanctions are firmly in place...
...You don't have a Dallas in this report, you don't have Miami, you don't have Los Angeles...
...Yet that at least suggests the law has had a positive effect in Florida— which is what proponents said in the first place...
...Nevertheless, the Maryland paper won some attention...
...What is doubtful is that statistics will settle anything...
...Almost half the burglaries in Canada and Britain, which have tough gun control laws, are "hot burglaries" [where someone is at home when the criminal strikes...
...As with all social phenomena, though, it is difficult to isolate cause and effect...
...Even citizens who met minimum requirements—taking a gun-safety course, not having a criminal record—might still have been denied permits (rural sheriffs were generally far more liberal in issuing permits than their urban and suburban counterparts...
...Thirty-one states now have some form of shall-issue law, up from nine in 1986...
...Again, the results are heatedly disputed...
...Not that academics haven't been trying...
...Our concern is people's basic right to protect themselves...
...The Florida law was a reaction to a wave of violent crime in the state that had worsened throughout the 1980s...
...Last August, the New York State Court of Appeals upheld the ruling of a trial judge that a high school security guard violated the constitutional rights of a student when he seized a loaded pistol the student was trying to carry into school...
...The trial judge was convinced that the student hid his weapon so carefully, the security guard could not possibly have seen it...
...Florida adopted the first such law in 1987 and saw a subsequent drop in crime—although there is fierce debate over whether the law and the drop are connected...
...Their study has been excoriated by the gun-control lobby, which has called the authors pawns of the gun industry...
...and over 60,000 aggravated assaults would have been avoided yearly...
...But Black and Nagin are far more circumspect...
...Teaming with David Mustard, a graduate student in the University of Chicago economics department, Lott pulled together crime statistics over a 16-year period from all 3,054 counties in the United States...
...Other critics have been more sober...
...What Lott and Mustard have basically done is looked at a lot of rural, low-crime states and then tried to project these results into urban areas," said Weil, of the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence...
...The study had obvious limits...
...Just because the conclusions aren't supported by the current data doesn't mean they can't be true...
...In that respect, the Pennsylvania legislature probably acted wisely in 1989 when it exempted Philadelphia from a statewide shall-issue law...
...We re-analyzed Lott and Mustard's data and found that what they were actually measuring was a downward trend in crime that had already started in these states before the shall-issue laws were passed," said Black...
...This fear causes American burglars to spend more time than their foreign counterparts "casing" a house to ensure that nobody is home...
...Then it occurred to me how safe they truly were...
...Sentencing Commission (1988-1989) and now a teacher at the University of Chicago law school...
...They found no increase in accidental deaths by firearms...
...Florida crime rates remained level from 1988 to 1990, then took a big dive...
...I thought something a lot better could be done...
...Although my parents, gentle suburbanites, had nothing in the house more lethal than a Ping-Pong paddle, everyone else within 50 miles slept with a shotgun under the bed...
...After a great deal of calculating to exclude other factors that might affect the crime rate, the pair found that murder rates dropped 8.5 percent, rapes 5 percent, aggravated assaults 7 percent, and armed robberies 2 percent in the years following adoption of shall-issue laws like Florida's...
...Centers for Disease Control, they looked at homicide rates in five cities—Tampa, Miami, Jacksonville, Jackson, Miss., and Portland, Ore.—both before and after shall-issue laws went into effect...
...Black, however, is critical of the smear campaign against Lott and Mustard...
...The data extended only through 1991, missing the crime drop in Florida that started that year...
...been a significant drop in crime where states have freed up handgun permits...
...By contrast, the U.S., with laxer restrictions, has a "hot burglary" rate of only 13 percent . . . [S]urveys of convicted felons in America reveal that they are much more worried about armed victims than about running into the police...
...This question of whether handguns deter more than they incite is more than academic...
...On a grant from the U.S...
...My parents were free-riders on a highly organized, if informal, system of crime deterrence...
...If either had had ready access to a gun, I'm sure there would have been bloodshed...
...We also found that their results were essentially being driven by Florida, which had a big drop in crime during this period...
...An example of how ludicrous it can become: When you describe carrying a concealed weapon as a civil-liberties issue, everyone switches sides...
...The more guns people are carrying, the more likely it is that ordinary confrontations will escalate into violent confrontations...
Vol. 2 • December 1996 • No. 14
