Author | John R. Lott |
---|---|
Language | English |
Subject | Gun control |
Genre | Non-fiction |
Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
Publication date | June 1, 1998 (1st ed.) Jun 15, 2000 (2nd ed.) May 24, 2010 (3rd ed.) |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | Paperback (3rd ed.) |
Pages | 472 (3rd ed.) |
ISBN | 0-226-49366-0 (3rd ed.) |
OCLC | 38067725 |
344.73/0533 21 | |
LC Class | KF3941 .L68 1998 |
Preceded by | Straight Shooting |
Followed by | The Bias Against Guns |
More Guns, Less Crime is a book by John R. Lott Jr. that says violent crime rates go down when states pass "shall issue" concealed carry laws. He presents the results of his statistical analysis of crime data for every county in the United States during 29 years from 1977 to 2005. Each edition of the book was refereed by the University of Chicago Press. As of 2019, the book is no longer published by the University of Chicago Press. The book examines city, county and state level data from the entire United States and measures the impact of 13 different types of gun control laws on crime rates. The book expands on an earlier study published in 1997 by Lott and his co-author David Mustard in The Journal of Legal Studies [1] and by Lott and his co-author John Whitley in The Journal of Law and Economics , October 2001. [2]
Below are summaries of the main topics discussed in More Guns, Less Crime.
Lott examines the effects of shall issue laws on violent crime across the United States.
His conclusion is that shall issue laws, which allow citizens to carry concealed weapons, steadily decrease violent crime. He explains that this result makes sense because criminals are deterred by the risk of attacking an armed victim. As more citizens arm themselves, the danger to criminals increases.
Lott examines the effects of training requirements on crime rate and accident rate. He finds that training requirements have very little effect on both crime rates and accident rates.
Lott examines the effects of waiting periods. These include limiting the time before purchasing a gun, and limiting the time before obtaining a concealed carry permit.
Lott examines the effects of the Brady law.
The third edition of the book is the first study to examine Stand Your Ground and Castle Doctrine laws.
The focus of the book is overwhelmingly on the US, but Lott does mention briefly gun ownership and crime rates in other countries, such as Great Britain, Ireland, and Jamaica, noting that murder rates rose after guns were banned. He also notes that many countries, such as Switzerland, Finland, New Zealand, and Israel, have high gun ownership rates and low crime rates, while many other countries have both low gun ownership rates and either high or low crime rates.
Partially in response to Lott's book, a sixteen-member panel of the United States National Research Council was convened to address the issue of whether right-to-carry laws influenced crime rate. They also looked at many other gun control measures, including the soon-to-expire 1994 Assault Weapon Ban, gun buy-backs, and bans on handgun possession or carry. In 2004 they issued the report "Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review" which examined Lott's statistical methods in detail, including computation of the statistical uncertainties involved, and wrote:
The committee found that answers to some of the most pressing questions cannot be addressed with existing data and research methods, however well designed. Indeed, the committee was unable to find any of the laws that it examined had any effect on crime or suicide rates. In the case of right-to-carry laws, despite a large body of research, the committee found no credible evidence that the passage of right-to-carry laws decreases or increases violent crime, and there is almost no empirical evidence that the more than 80 prevention programs focused on gun-related violence have had any effect on children's behavior, knowledge, attitudes, or beliefs about firearms. The committee found that the data available on these questions are too weak to support unambiguous conclusions or strong policy statements. [3]
The council determined that Lott's data sets can be subject to manipulation given a number of factors, so that different studies produce different results. "While the trend models show a reduction in the crime growth rate following the adoption of right-to-carry laws, these trend reductions occur long after law adoption, casting serious doubt on the proposition that the trend models estimated in the literature reflect effects of the law change." [3]
The issue of right-to-carry laws was the only law that drew a dissent from the committee's otherwise universal findings that it could not reach a conclusion. In a very unusual dissent for National Research Council reports, criminologist James Q. Wilson wrote that:
The direct evidence that such shooting sprees occur is nonexistent. The indirect evidence, as found in papers by Black and Nagin and Ayres and Donohue [cited in Chapter 6], is controversial. Indeed, the Ayres and Donohue paper shows that there was a "statistically significant downward shift in the trend" of the murder rate (Chapter 6, page 135). This suggests to me that for people interested in RTC laws, the best evidence we have is that they impose no costs but may confer benefits. ... In sum, I find that the evidence presented by Lott and his supporters suggests that RTC laws do in fact help drive down the murder rate, though their effect on other crimes is ambiguous. [4]
A conference organized by the Center for Law, Economics, and Public Policy at Yale Law School and held at American Enterprise Institute was published in a special issue of The Journal of Law and Economics . [5] Academics of all interests in the debate were invited to participate and provide refereed empirical research. [6] As follows are some papers from that conference supported Lott's conclusions. [7]
Other refereed empirical academic studies besides the original paper with David Mustard that have supported Lott's conclusions include the following.
Some academic studies that have rejected Lott's conclusions include the following. Virtually all of these studies contend that there seems to be little or no effect on crime from the passage of license-to-carry laws. One by Ayres and Donohue, published in 2003, finds a temporary increase in aggravated assaults. The authors of the book Freakonomics report "troubling allegation that Lott actually invented some of the survey data that supports his theory" [27] and that other scholars couldn’t replicate his results (a court later dismissed Lott's defamation claim against the authors). [28]
There have been three editions of More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws, all published by University of Chicago Press. As of 2019, this book is no longer published by the University of Chicago Press:
Gun control, or firearms regulation, is the set of laws or policies that regulate the manufacture, sale, transfer, possession, modification, or use of firearms by civilians.
John Richard Lott Jr. is an American economist, political commentator, and gun rights advocate. Lott was formerly employed at various academic institutions and at the American Enterprise Institute conservative think tank. He is the former president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, a nonprofit he founded in 2013. He worked in the Office of Justice Programs within the U.S. Department of Justice under the Donald Trump administration from October 2020 to January 2021. Lott holds a Ph.D. in economics from UCLA.
The right to keep and bear arms is a legal right for people to possess weapons (arms) for the preservation of life, liberty, and property. The purpose of gun rights is for self-defense, as well as hunting and sporting activities. Countries that guarantee the right to keep and bear arms include Albania, Czech Republic, Guatemala, Ukraine, Mexico, the United States, Yemen, and Switzerland.
The Sullivan Act was a gun control law in New York state that took effect in 1911. The NY state law requires licenses for New Yorkers to possess firearms small enough to be concealed. Private possession of such firearms without a license was a misdemeanor, and carrying them in public is a felony. The law was the subject of controversy regarding both its selective enforcement and the licensing bribery schemes it enabled. The act was named for its primary legislative sponsor, state senator Timothy Sullivan, a Tammany Hall Democrat.
Gun politics is defined in the United States by two primary opposing ideologies concerning the private ownership of firearms. Those who advocate for gun control support increasingly restrictive regulation of gun ownership; those who advocate for gun rights oppose increased restriction, or support the liberalization of gun ownership. These groups typically disagree on the interpretation of the text, history and tradition of the laws and judicial opinions concerning gun ownership in the United States and the meaning of the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. American gun politics involves these groups' further disagreement concerning the role of firearms in public safety, the studied effects of ownership of firearms on public health and safety, and the role of guns in national and state crime.
A theory regarding the effect of legalized abortion on crime is a controversial hypothesis about the reduction in crime in the decades following the legalization of abortion. Proponents argue that the availability of abortion resulted in fewer births of children at the highest risk of committing crime. The earliest research suggesting such an effect was a 1966 study in Sweden. In 2001, Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago and John Donohue of Yale University argued, citing their research and earlier studies, that children who are unwanted or whose parents cannot support them are likelier to become criminals. This idea was further popularized by its inclusion in the book Freakonomics, which Levitt co-wrote.
Concealed carry, or carrying a concealed weapon (CCW), is the practice of carrying a weapon in public in a concealed manner, either on one's person or in close proximity. CCW is often practiced as a means of self-defense. Following the Supreme Court's NYSRPA v. Bruen (2022) decision, all states in the United States were required to allow for concealed carry of a handgun either permitlessly or with a permit, although the difficulty in obtaining a permit varies per jurisdiction.
Concealed carry, or carrying a concealed weapon (CCW), is the practice of carrying a weapon, either in proximity to or on one's person or in public places in a manner that hides or conceals the weapon's presence from surrounding observers. In the United States, the opposite of concealed carry is called open carry.
Gun violence is a term of political, economic and sociological interest referring to the tens of thousands of annual firearms-related deaths and injuries occurring in the United States. In 2022, up to 100 daily fatalities and hundreds of daily injuries were attributable to gun violence in the United States. In 2018, the most recent year for which data are available, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics reported 38,390 deaths by firearm, of which 24,432 were suicides. The national rate of firearm deaths rose from 10.3 people for every 100,000 in 1999 to 11.9 people per 100,000 in 2018, equating to over 109 daily deaths. In 2010, there were 19,392 firearm-related suicides, and 11,078 firearm-related homicides in the U.S. In 2010, 358 murders were reported involving a rifle while 6,009 were reported involving a handgun; another 1,939 were reported with an unspecified type of firearm. In 2011, a total of 478,400 fatal and nonfatal violent crimes were committed with a firearm.
Gun-related violence is violence committed with the use of a firearm. Gun-related violence may or may not be considered criminal. Criminal violence includes homicide, assault with a deadly weapon, and suicide, or attempted suicide, depending on jurisdiction. Non-criminal violence includes accidental or unintentional injury and death. Also generally included in gun violence statistics are military or para-military activities.
In the United States, the right to keep and bear arms is modulated by a variety of state and federal statutes. These laws generally regulate the manufacture, trade, possession, transfer, record keeping, transport, and destruction of firearms, ammunition, and firearms accessories. They are enforced by state, local and the federal agencies which include the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).
The State of Texas is considered to have some of the most relaxed gun laws in the United States. Public concerns over gun control in Texas have increased in recent years as Mexican drug cartels continue to commit violent crimes closer to Texas' stretch of the Mexico–United States border. They have also increased due to the number of incidents, including misuse of firearms stolen from other sources.
Gun laws in Colorado regulate the sale, possession, and use of firearms and ammunition in the state of Colorado in the United States.
John J. Donohue III is an American law professor, economist, and the C. Wendell and Edith M. Carlsmith Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. He is widely known for his writings on effect of legalized abortion on crime and for his criticism of John Lott's book More Guns, Less Crime.
Defensive gun use (DGU) is the use or presentation of a firearm for self-defense, defense of others or, in some cases, protecting property. The frequency of incidents involving DGU and their effectiveness in providing safety and reducing crime are controversial issues in gun politics and criminology, chiefly in the United States. Different authors and studies employ different criteria for what constitutes a defensive gun use which leads to controversy in comparing statistical results. Perceptions of defensive gun use are recurring themes in discussions over gun rights, gun control, armed police, open and concealed carry of firearms.
The Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act, popularly known as the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, was a subsection of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, a United States federal law which included a prohibition on the manufacture for civilian use of certain semi-automatic firearms that were defined as assault weapons as well as certain ammunition magazines that were defined as large capacity.
A high-capacity magazine ban is a law which bans or otherwise restricts detachable firearm magazines that can hold more than a certain number of rounds of ammunition. For example, in the United States, the now-expired Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 included limits regarding magazines that could hold more than ten rounds. As of 2022, twelve U.S. states, and a number of local governments, ban or regulate magazines that they have legally defined as high-capacity. The majority of states do not ban or regulate any magazines on the basis of capacity. States that do have large capacity magazine bans or restrictions typically do not apply to firearms with fixed magazines whose capacity would otherwise exceed the large capacity threshold.
Carlisle E. Moody is an American economist, criminologist, and professor of economics at the College of William & Mary.
David Brendan Mustard is an American economist and the Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor of economics at the University of Georgia's Terry College of Business.
The history of concealed carry in the United States is the history of public opinion, policy, and law regarding the practice of carrying concealed firearms, especially handguns.