Confirming More Guns, Less Crime

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=372361

Confirming More Guns, Less Crime

JOHN R. LOTT, JR.
American Enterprise Institute (AEI) – General

FLORENZ PLASSMANN
State University of New York – Department of Economics

JOHN E. WHITLEY
University of Adelaide – School of Economics

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Abstract:

Analyzing county level data for the entire United States from 1977 to 2000,
we find annual reductions in murder rates between 1.5 and 2.3 percent for
each additional year that a right-to-carry law is in effect. For the first
five years that such a law is in effect, the total benefit from reduced
crimes usually ranges between about $2 billion and $3 billion per year.

Ayres and Donohue have simply misread their own results. Their own most
generalized specification that breaks down the impact of the law on a
year-by-year basis shows large crime reducing benefits. Virtually none of
their claims that their county level hybrid model implies initial
significant increases in crime are correct. Overall, the vast majority of
their estimates based on data up to 1997 actually demonstrate that
right-to-carry laws produce substantial crime reducing benefits. We show
that their models also do an extremely poor job of predicting the changes in
crime rates after 1997.