Shooting Down the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis

By I. Ayres, John J Donohue. 2002

215 citations recorded by the source corpus.

John Lott and David Mustard have used regression analysis to argue forcefully that 'shall-issue' laws (which give citizens an unimpeded right to secure permits for concealed weapons) reduce violent crime. While certain facially plausible statistical models appear to generate this conclusion, more refined analyses of more recent state and county data undermine the more guns, less crime hypothesis. The most robust finding on the state data is that certain property crimes rise with passage of shall- issue laws, although the absence of any clear theory as to why this would be the case tends to undercut any strong conclusions. Estimating more statistically preferred disaggregated models on more complete county data, we show that in most states shall- issue laws have been associated with more crime and that the apparent stimulus to crime tends to be especially strong for those states that adopted in the last decade. While there are substantial concerns about model reliability and robustness, we present estimates based on disaggregated county data models that on net the passage of the law in 24 jurisdictions has increased the annual cost of crime slightly -- somewhere on the order of half a billion dollars. We also provide an illustration of how our jurisdiction-specific regression model has the capacity to generate more nuanced assessments concerning which states might profit from or be harmed by a particular legal intervention.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Health, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f780af76a1b51315192619ef9f380917ba0f244b

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Citations in the corpus

MEASURING CRACK COCAINE AND ITS IMPACT (2013, background): “Ayres and Donohue (2003), for instance, conjecture that the findings of Lott and Mustard (1997) and Lott (2000) regarding the impact of concealed weapons laws are spurious, driven by the omitted variable crack cocaine.”
Panel data quantile regression with grouped fixed effects (2018, methodology): “ in the previous year, real per capita personal income (denoted as rpcpi) and other demographic variables on population proportions in dierent age-gender groups for various ethnicities. As argued in Ayres and Donohue (2003) and Aneja, Donohue, and Zhang (2014), to avoid multicollinearity and account”
Do Data Breaches Disclosure Laws Reduce Identity Theft? (2010, unknown): “…al, 1978; Levitt 1995; Nagin 1998; Robinson, Darley and John, 2003) and others have focused specifically on the deterrent effects of gun laws and crime (Lott and Mustard 1997; Black and Nagin 1996, Donohue and Ayres 2003) and capital punishment (Mocan and Gittings 2003; Donohue and Wolfers, 2006).”