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