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Until recently, when he bought a 9-mm Ruger after his own research impressed
upon him the value of gun ownership, John Lott had no personal experience with
firearms, aside from one day of riflery in summer camp when he was 12. That
fact did not stop a reviewer of Lott's 1998 book, More Guns, Less Crime
(University of Chicago Press), from labeling him a "gun nut." Writing in
The American Prospect, Edward Cohn also identified Lott as "a leading
loon of the Chicago School of economics, known for its ultra-market ideology."
But that was gentle--a backhanded compliment, even--compared to the attacks
from anti-gun activists, who accused Lott of producing his landmark study at
the behest of the gun industry.
Lott, now a senior research scholar at Yale Law School, used to be the John M.
Olin Law and Economics Fellow at the University of Chicago. That position, like
similar ones at other major universities, was endowed by a foundation based on
the personal fortune of the late John M. Olin, former chairman of the Olin
Corporation. Among many other things, the Olin Corporation makes Winchester
ammunition. These facts led Kristen Rand of the Violence Policy Center to
conclude that "Lott's work was, in essence, funded by the firearms industry"--a
charge that was echoed by other gun control ad-vocates, including Charles
Schumer, then a Democratic representative from New York and now a senator.
Never mind that assuming the Olin Foundation takes orders from "the firearms
industry" is like assuming the Ford Foundation does the bidding of automakers.
Never mind that Olin fellows are chosen by faculty committees, not by the
foundation (with which Lott never had any contact). Proponents of gun control
were desperate to discredit Lott, because his findings contradicted their dark
predictions about what would happen if states allowed law-abiding citizens to
carry concealed handguns.
Analyzing 18 years of data for more than 3,000 counties, Lott found that
violent crime drops significantly when states switch from discretionary permit
policies, which give local officials the authority to determine who may carry a
gun, to "shall issue" or "right-to-carry" laws, which require that permits be
granted to everyone who meets certain objective criteria. That conclusion,
first set forth in a 1997 paper that Lott co-authored with David Mustard,
now an economist at the University of Georgia, heartened defenders of gun
ownership and dismayed their opponents. Arguing that "shall issue" laws are
beneficial, while other gun laws are ineffective at best, Lott quickly became
one of the most widely cited--and reviled--scholars in the gun control
debate.
Though it was the gun issue that brought Lott notoriety, it hasn't been the
focus of his career. The 41-year-old economist, who earned his Ph.D. at UCLA,
has published papers on a wide variety of topics, including professional
licensing, criminal punishment, campaign finance, and public education. Last
summer he published Are Predatory Commitments Credible? (University of
Chicago Press), a skeptical look at theories of predatory pricing, and he is
working on a book about the reputational penalties faced by criminals, a
longstanding interest. In addition to his positions at Yale and the University
of Chicago, Lott has served as chief economist at the U.S. Sentencing
Commission and taught at UCLA and the University of Pennsylvania, among other
schools. He lives in Swarth-more, Pennsylvania, with his wife and four
children. Senior Editor Jacob Sullum and Washington Editor Michael Lynch talked
to Lott at his Yale Law School office in mid-October. Reason: John R. Lott Jr.:
You had very small samples. By far the largest previous study on guns and crime
had looked at just 170 cities within a single year, 1980. Most of the rest
looked at, say, 24 counties or 24 cities within a single year. No one had tried
to account for things like arrest rates or conviction rates or prison sentence
lengths. And the studies were all very limited in the sense that they were
purely cross-sectional, where you look at the crime rates across jurisdictions
in one year, or [purely longitudinal], where you pick one city or one county
and look at it over time.
It was basically because of that class that I saw the benefit to going out and
trying to do it right. So I put together what I think is by far the largest
study that's ever been done on crime. The book has data on all 3,000-plus
counties in the U.S. over an 18-year period. And simply having that large a
data set allows you to account for hundreds of factors, thousands of factors,
that you couldn't have accounted for in those smaller data sets. Reason: Lott:
The intensity of the issue on both sides is something I wouldn't have expected
before I got into it. I've been involved in a lot of debates, and people tell
me, "You should have anticipated this before you did the study." But I've
written about 80 academic articles, and the interest in this has been so
outside the range of experiences I've had before. With the vast majority of
articles, you're happy if you can get 10 people to read it.
Reason: Lott:
I don't think that most of the comments [the critics] are making are really
that difficult to understand. One of the claims, for instance, is that I'm
assuming that when these laws are passed there will be a one-time drop in
violent crime rates, and it should be the same across all places that adopt
these laws. That's absurd. I don't know how much time I spend in the book
saying that the level of deterrence is related, according to the data, to the
probability that people are going to be able to defend themselves, and the rate
at which people get permits changes over time. When you pass these laws, not
everybody who eventually is going to get a permit does it the first day.
Fifteen years after these laws go into effect, you're still seeing an
increasing percentage of the population getting these permits and a decreasing
rate of violent crime because of the additional deterrence.
I spend lots of time in the book talking about why you don't expect the drop in
crime to be the same in all places....In more urban areas [of states with
discretionary permit laws], public officials were especially reluctant to issue
permits. So when you change to a nondiscretionary rule, the biggest increases
in permits tended to be in these urban areas, and that is where you observe the
biggest drops in violent crime.
Reason: Lott:
After these laws are adopted, you see a drop in violent crime, and it continues
over time as the percentage of the population with permits increases. If I look
at neighboring counties on either side of a state border, when one state passes
its right-to-carry law, I see a drop in violent crime in that county, but the
other county, right across the state border, in a state without a
right-to-carry law, sees an increase in its violent crime rate. You try to
control for differences in the legal system, arrest and conviction rates,
different types of laws, demographics, poverty, drug prices --all sorts of
things. You look at something like that, and I think it's pretty hard to come
up with some other explanation. I think you're seeing some criminals move
[across the state line].
You find the types of people who benefit the most from these laws. The biggest
drops in crime are among women and the elderly, who are physically weaker, and
in the high-crime, relatively poor areas where people are most vulnerable.
There are five or six things that one could point to that confirm different
parts of the theory. I haven't heard anybody come up with a story that explains
all these different pieces of evidence....Since you have all these states
changing their laws at different times, it becomes harder and harder to think
of some left-out factor that just happened to be changing in all these
different states at the same time the right-to-carry law got changed. Reason: Lott:
Now, I think it's somewhat misleading to look only at the simple
before-and-after averages. Take the case where violent crime rates are rising
right up to the point when the law goes into effect and falling afterward, and
let's say it was a perfectly symmetrical inverted V. If I were to take
the average crime rate before the law goes into effect and the average
afterward, where the point of the V is when the law changed, they're
going to be the same. Does that mean the law had no impact? When you drop
Florida from the sample, [the results] look more like this inverted V
than they do when Florida is in there. So I would argue that it strengthens the
results, if what you care about is the change in direction.
In any case, the bottom line to me is this: I wanted all the data that were
available....I didn't pick and choose, and when somebody drops out 86 percent
of the counties along with Florida, you know they must have tried all sorts of
combinations. This wasn't the first obvious combination that sprang to mind.
And it's the only combination they report....If, after doing all these
gymnastics, and recording only one type of specification, dealing with
before-and-after averages that are biased against finding a benefit, they still
find only benefits, and no cost, to me that strengthens the results. Reason: Lott: Reason: Lott: Reason: Lott: Reason: Lott: Reason: Lott: Reason: Lott: Reason: Lott: Reason: Lott:
For a woman, for example, by far the most dangerous course of action to take
when she's confronted by a criminal is to use her fists. The reason is pretty
simple: You're almost always talking about a male criminal doing the attacking,
so in the case of a female victim there's a large strength differential. And
for a woman to use her fists is very likely to result in a physical response
from the attacker and a high probability of serious injury or death to the
woman. For women, by far the safest course of action is to have a gun. A woman
who behaves passively is 2.5 times as likely to end up being seriously injured
as a woman who has a gun. Reason: Lott:
But I don't think that explains everything. One example is gun deaths involving
children. My guess is that if you go out and ask people, how many gun deaths
involve children under age 5, or under age 10, in the United States, they're
going to say thousands. When you tell them that in 1996 there were 17 gun
deaths for children under age 5 in the United States and 44 for children under
age 10, they're just astounded. There's a reason why they believe these deaths
occur much more frequently: If you have a gun death in the home involving a
child under age 5, you're going to get national news coverage. Five times more
children drown in bathtubs; more than twice as many drown in five-gallon water
buckets around the home. But those deaths do not get national news coverage.
This type of news coverage has consequences, because it affects people's
perceptions of the benefits and costs of having guns around. Concentrating on
gun deaths in the home, exaggerating the risks of that, creates a false
impression. People are going to die because of that false impression. They're
not going to have guns in the home, even though that's by far the safest course
of action for them to take when they're confronted by a criminal. You may
prevent some of the accidental deaths, but you're going to create other types
of deaths because people won't be able to defend themselves.
I think the debate would be so different now if, even once in a while, some of
the life-saving uses of guns got some attention in the news. A couple of the
public school shootings were stopped by citizens armed with guns well before
the police were able to arrive. Or take the case of the day trader shooting in
Atlanta, which got huge attention. Within 10 days after that, there were three
separate attacks in the Atlanta area that were stopped by citizens with guns,
in two cases permitted concealed handguns. They got no attention outside of the
local media market. Reason: Lott: Reason: Lott: Reason: Lott: Reason: Lott:
But let's say a kid's gone hunting in the morning before school. He has the gun
in the trunk of his car, parks it in the school parking lot, and goes into
school. Somebody finds out that he has a gun there. The prosecutor looks at the
case and says, "This is a good kid, never done anything wrong. He probably just
didn't realize he shouldn't have done this. Do I really want to send this kid
to jail for three years for this type of violation?" It's wrong to think that
these prosecutors are making the types of mistakes that are being assumed.
Reason: Lott:
It's only been since the end of 1995 that we've banned guns within 1,000 feet
of schools by federal law. Right after the Columbine attack, a friend of mine
dropped off his kids at a public school in Seattle, and he e-mailed me
afterward, because there was a big sign in front of the school that said, "This
is a gun-free zone." The question I had was, if I put a sign like that in front
of my home, would I think that people who are intent on attacking my home would
be less likely, or more likely, to harm my children and my wife? You may be
trying to create a safe area for your family, but what you've ended up
accidentally doing is creating a safe zone for [criminals], because they have
less to worry about.
The thing that I'd like to see the NRA try to do is to say, when attacks occur,
since we can't have the police every place all the time, why not let these
people defend themselves? The people who get permits for concealed handguns
tend to be extremely law-abiding. They've never done one of these attacks in
the 70 years that we've had these types of permits. When these people lose
their permits, and it's only a tiny fraction of 1 percent who do, it's usually
for reasons that have nothing to do with posing a threat to other people. Laws
[like the Gun-Free School Zones Act] are obeyed by honest, law-abiding
citizens, not by people who are intent on carrying out attacks. And to the
extent that you disarm the law-abiding citizens in certain areas, you increase
the probability of these attacks, which perversely leads to calls for more
regulations.
Another example is gun locks. If I were with the NRA, I would emphasize the
cost of constantly talking about this issue. You're actually endangering
people's lives, for two reasons. One, you're exaggerating in their minds the
risks of having guns in the home. And two, I would say it's not in everybody's
interest to have a lock on their gun. If you live in a safe area and maybe have
young kids, that might be fine. But if you live in a city, even if you have
kids, I don't think it's really the wisest thing to have the gun locked up,
because you're not going to be able to quickly access it to defend your family.
And when you compare probabilities, accidental gun deaths in the home are
trivial compared to the rate at which other types of deaths occur from crimes
where innocent victims are attacked and a gun would benefit them. Reason: Lott: |
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