http://www.jointogether.org/gv/news/features/reader/0,2061,561876,00.html
A New Book Refutes John Lott - And More
2/25/2003
Feature Story
by Dick Dahl
The recent revelations about apparent research fabrications and unethical self-promotion by gun-rights darling John Lott has drawn renewed attention to gun-violence research. So a new book by the Brookings Institution Press, "Evaluating Gun Policy," may be appearing at a propitious time.
Lott, a University of Chicago economist, is the author of the 1998 book, "More Guns, Less Crime," which concludes that concealed-carry laws reduce crime. The book purports to prove that criminals are deterred by the prospect of gun-carrying citizens, and has been highly influential in the rush by state legislatures-33 at last count-to pass such laws.
Lott, however, has come under intense recent criticism for his work. First, Julian Sanchez, a pro-gun, libertarian Cato Institute researcher, found evidence that Lott had created a fictitious soulmate named Mary Rosh to glowingly review his work on the Internet. Second, Northwestern University law professor James Lindgren reported that he had investigated Lott's claim of a 1997 survey which found that "98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack," and found no evidence of the survey's existence.
If things weren't already bad enough for Lott and his supporters, they've just gotten worse. The new Brookings Institution Press book, a collection of new research findings on gun policy, contains an article by two law professors who have reworked the Lott data and come up with conclusions that contradict him. The article, written by professors John Donohue of Stanford Law School and Ian Ayres of Yale Law School, summarize that "if anything there is stronger evidence for the conclusion that these laws increase crime than there is for the conclusion that they decrease it."
While crime may have dropped in concealed-carry states, crime has generally dropped more in the other states during the 1990s. The result, as Donohue told Join Together Online (JTO), is that supporters of concealed-carry laws "are not enthusiastic about noting that crime fell more in the states that didn't adopt those laws. So they just look at the states that passed them and say, 'Look how crime fell.'"
The result, a half truth based on questionable research, has had enormous influence in forming recent public firearms policy. But as the new book points out, it is not the only conventional wisdom about guns that fails the test of closer scrutiny.
The book's co-editors, Philip J. Cook, a professor of public policy at Duke University, and Jens Ludwig, an associate professor of public policy at Georgetown University, describe it as a pragmatic analysis of evidence. They also contend that many of the book's findings call a variety of specific gun policies into question.
As Ludwig points out, for instance, there is no evidence to support the claim by the NRA and its supporters that Richmond, Va.'s Project Exile is the ideal model for reducing gun-related crime. Project Exile, which began in early 1997, employs a hard-nosed zero-tolerance approach to gun violence by fast tracking gun cases into the federal criminal justice system, where penalties tend to be more severe. It pays no attention to how guns flow into a community or targeting those responsible. The program has since gone statewide and is now being used by the Bush Administration as a model for its national Project Safe Neighborhoods program, the administration's answer to the problems of gun violence in America.
Gun homicides dropped by 40 percent during the first year of Project Exile's operation. One of the problems, however, as Ludwig and University of California at Berkeley economist Steven Raphael point out in their chapter about the program, is that Richmond had had an extremely high escalation of gun homicides prior to Project Exile's creation. "Richmond was sort of the Qualcomm of crime," Ludwig told JTO. "It had one of the largest run-ups initially and then when that bubble burst, it had one of the largest falls."
They also note in their article that the decline in gun homicides had begun prior to Project Exile. When they compared the decline in Richmond with other cities, they found it ordinary.
"I'm not intending to bash Project Exile," Ludwig said. "It may be a useful complement to doing other things. But it is not a substitute. It is not a magic cure."
While Project Exile may not be all it's cracked up to be, Ludwig and co-author Jacqueline Cohen, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, looked at another get-tough approach to gun violence in another chapter of the book and found value in targeted policing programs. These are the efforts, exemplified by the Kansas City Gun Experiment, that employ police patrols to be aggressive in targeted high-crime areas, including such methods as stopping and searching people and cars if they are suspicious.
The problem with targeted policing programs, Ludwig said, is that even though they may get some guns and criminals off the street, there is an extra potential cost to the community when police become too aggressive. In Pittsburgh, though, Ludwig and Cohen found that the police were effective in minimizing community tensions at the same time that "it may have been effective in reducing gun crime. It's an encouraging suggestive picture, but I certainly wouldn't claim that that's the last word on the topic."
While the book questions Operation Exile's exalted status, it takes a much harder line in demolishing a statistic often used by gun-rights supporters: The nation has 20,000 gun laws, so why do we need more? Jon Vernick, director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Gun Policy and Research, and colleague Lisa Hepburn examine gun laws and their actual number in another chapter and conclude that the figure is essentially a myth. They date the origin of the number to longtime NRA supporter Congressman John Dingell (D-Mich.), who first used the number, without any attribution, in 1965. It's never gone away and it's never been examined.
The purpose of his and Hepburn's research, Vernick told JTO, was to "develop a data set of federal and state gun-control laws" to provide a base for further research. Their purpose, he said, was to establish not just which laws exist, but when they were passed. Dating the laws is important, he said, because it enables longitudinal studies. "If you're trying to figure out the effect of, say, child-access prevention laws on suicide or unintentional deaths, you need to know for a given state and year whether the law was in effect then and what other laws were out there so that you can control for their effect," he said.
The finding about the myth of 20,000 gun laws was the result of that effort. Vernick and Hepburn counted up the federal and state laws dealing with guns and came up with a figure of 300.
"I'm sure there's a way to count 20,000 gun laws if you count not just gun-control laws and laws in every tiny jurisdiction everywhere," he said. "But our conclusion is that you've got 300 or so major state gun-control laws that fit our definition for this chapter and a handful of major federal laws with subparts, but even if you count all the subparts separately you wouldn't get anything approaching 20,000."
Another way of coming up with 20,000, as Vernick noted, might be to add up the plethora of municipal gun statutes of the "no squirrel shooting in the city park" variety. The trouble is, many and probably most of those statutes have been rendered moot by NRA-pushed preemption laws designed to head off any municipality that might seek to pass real gun-control ordinances. Today, more than 40 states preempt all or most local gun-control laws.
In another chapter, Cook and Ludwig examine the claim that guns deter burglary and found it unsupported by the facts. Supporters of the deterrence theory often point to Great Britain, which has higher rates of "hot" burglaries (those that occur when the occupant is home) than in the U.S. Cook and Ludwig found that in England, however, several factors might explain the higher burglary rates: more lenient sentencing, fewer dogs, lower percentages of men in households.
While a more accurate comparison of U.S. vs. U.K. burglary rates won't be valid until those other variables are accounted for, Cook and Ludwig provided more exact comparisons when they looked at burglary rates in urban versus rural area of the U.S. Their conclusion is that guns in the home actually increase the likelihood of burglary. The authors suggest the reason may be that guns are often the targeted loot of a burglar. They found, for instance, that in 14 percent of the residential burglaries in the National Crime Victimization Survey data they analyzed, guns were the only items stolen.
Co-editors Cook and Ludwig hope that the book contributes something valuable to the debate about gun violence in the U.S. "I think that part of what makes the book important is that there are totally new things in it that nobody has looked at before," Ludwig said. "Another reason is that there are things that have been looked at but that the book looks at in a new and more rigorous way."
He said the Lott data and the Donohue/Ayres examination of it falls into that category.
Cook agreed with the assessment that the book is coming out at a time of heightened interest in gun policy as a result of Lott's foibles. "I think it's been useful in bringing social-science research on gun issues back as a news story," he said. "And this book is full of social-science research on gun issues."
A New Book Refutes John Lott - And More
2/25/2003
Feature Story
by Dick Dahl
The recent revelations about apparent research fabrications and unethical self-promotion by gun-rights darling John Lott has drawn renewed attention to gun-violence research. So a new book by the Brookings Institution Press, "Evaluating Gun Policy," may be appearing at a propitious time.
Lott, a University of Chicago economist, is the author of the 1998 book, "More Guns, Less Crime," which concludes that concealed-carry laws reduce crime. The book purports to prove that criminals are deterred by the prospect of gun-carrying citizens, and has been highly influential in the rush by state legislatures-33 at last count-to pass such laws.
Lott, however, has come under intense recent criticism for his work. First, Julian Sanchez, a pro-gun, libertarian Cato Institute researcher, found evidence that Lott had created a fictitious soulmate named Mary Rosh to glowingly review his work on the Internet. Second, Northwestern University law professor James Lindgren reported that he had investigated Lott's claim of a 1997 survey which found that "98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack," and found no evidence of the survey's existence.
If things weren't already bad enough for Lott and his supporters, they've just gotten worse. The new Brookings Institution Press book, a collection of new research findings on gun policy, contains an article by two law professors who have reworked the Lott data and come up with conclusions that contradict him. The article, written by professors John Donohue of Stanford Law School and Ian Ayres of Yale Law School, summarize that "if anything there is stronger evidence for the conclusion that these laws increase crime than there is for the conclusion that they decrease it."
While crime may have dropped in concealed-carry states, crime has generally dropped more in the other states during the 1990s. The result, as Donohue told Join Together Online (JTO), is that supporters of concealed-carry laws "are not enthusiastic about noting that crime fell more in the states that didn't adopt those laws. So they just look at the states that passed them and say, 'Look how crime fell.'"
The result, a half truth based on questionable research, has had enormous influence in forming recent public firearms policy. But as the new book points out, it is not the only conventional wisdom about guns that fails the test of closer scrutiny.
The book's co-editors, Philip J. Cook, a professor of public policy at Duke University, and Jens Ludwig, an associate professor of public policy at Georgetown University, describe it as a pragmatic analysis of evidence. They also contend that many of the book's findings call a variety of specific gun policies into question.
As Ludwig points out, for instance, there is no evidence to support the claim by the NRA and its supporters that Richmond, Va.'s Project Exile is the ideal model for reducing gun-related crime. Project Exile, which began in early 1997, employs a hard-nosed zero-tolerance approach to gun violence by fast tracking gun cases into the federal criminal justice system, where penalties tend to be more severe. It pays no attention to how guns flow into a community or targeting those responsible. The program has since gone statewide and is now being used by the Bush Administration as a model for its national Project Safe Neighborhoods program, the administration's answer to the problems of gun violence in America.
Gun homicides dropped by 40 percent during the first year of Project Exile's operation. One of the problems, however, as Ludwig and University of California at Berkeley economist Steven Raphael point out in their chapter about the program, is that Richmond had had an extremely high escalation of gun homicides prior to Project Exile's creation. "Richmond was sort of the Qualcomm of crime," Ludwig told JTO. "It had one of the largest run-ups initially and then when that bubble burst, it had one of the largest falls."
They also note in their article that the decline in gun homicides had begun prior to Project Exile. When they compared the decline in Richmond with other cities, they found it ordinary.
"I'm not intending to bash Project Exile," Ludwig said. "It may be a useful complement to doing other things. But it is not a substitute. It is not a magic cure."
While Project Exile may not be all it's cracked up to be, Ludwig and co-author Jacqueline Cohen, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, looked at another get-tough approach to gun violence in another chapter of the book and found value in targeted policing programs. These are the efforts, exemplified by the Kansas City Gun Experiment, that employ police patrols to be aggressive in targeted high-crime areas, including such methods as stopping and searching people and cars if they are suspicious.
The problem with targeted policing programs, Ludwig said, is that even though they may get some guns and criminals off the street, there is an extra potential cost to the community when police become too aggressive. In Pittsburgh, though, Ludwig and Cohen found that the police were effective in minimizing community tensions at the same time that "it may have been effective in reducing gun crime. It's an encouraging suggestive picture, but I certainly wouldn't claim that that's the last word on the topic."
While the book questions Operation Exile's exalted status, it takes a much harder line in demolishing a statistic often used by gun-rights supporters: The nation has 20,000 gun laws, so why do we need more? Jon Vernick, director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Gun Policy and Research, and colleague Lisa Hepburn examine gun laws and their actual number in another chapter and conclude that the figure is essentially a myth. They date the origin of the number to longtime NRA supporter Congressman John Dingell (D-Mich.), who first used the number, without any attribution, in 1965. It's never gone away and it's never been examined.
The purpose of his and Hepburn's research, Vernick told JTO, was to "develop a data set of federal and state gun-control laws" to provide a base for further research. Their purpose, he said, was to establish not just which laws exist, but when they were passed. Dating the laws is important, he said, because it enables longitudinal studies. "If you're trying to figure out the effect of, say, child-access prevention laws on suicide or unintentional deaths, you need to know for a given state and year whether the law was in effect then and what other laws were out there so that you can control for their effect," he said.
The finding about the myth of 20,000 gun laws was the result of that effort. Vernick and Hepburn counted up the federal and state laws dealing with guns and came up with a figure of 300.
"I'm sure there's a way to count 20,000 gun laws if you count not just gun-control laws and laws in every tiny jurisdiction everywhere," he said. "But our conclusion is that you've got 300 or so major state gun-control laws that fit our definition for this chapter and a handful of major federal laws with subparts, but even if you count all the subparts separately you wouldn't get anything approaching 20,000."
Another way of coming up with 20,000, as Vernick noted, might be to add up the plethora of municipal gun statutes of the "no squirrel shooting in the city park" variety. The trouble is, many and probably most of those statutes have been rendered moot by NRA-pushed preemption laws designed to head off any municipality that might seek to pass real gun-control ordinances. Today, more than 40 states preempt all or most local gun-control laws.
In another chapter, Cook and Ludwig examine the claim that guns deter burglary and found it unsupported by the facts. Supporters of the deterrence theory often point to Great Britain, which has higher rates of "hot" burglaries (those that occur when the occupant is home) than in the U.S. Cook and Ludwig found that in England, however, several factors might explain the higher burglary rates: more lenient sentencing, fewer dogs, lower percentages of men in households.
While a more accurate comparison of U.S. vs. U.K. burglary rates won't be valid until those other variables are accounted for, Cook and Ludwig provided more exact comparisons when they looked at burglary rates in urban versus rural area of the U.S. Their conclusion is that guns in the home actually increase the likelihood of burglary. The authors suggest the reason may be that guns are often the targeted loot of a burglar. They found, for instance, that in 14 percent of the residential burglaries in the National Crime Victimization Survey data they analyzed, guns were the only items stolen.
Co-editors Cook and Ludwig hope that the book contributes something valuable to the debate about gun violence in the U.S. "I think that part of what makes the book important is that there are totally new things in it that nobody has looked at before," Ludwig said. "Another reason is that there are things that have been looked at but that the book looks at in a new and more rigorous way."
He said the Lott data and the Donohue/Ayres examination of it falls into that category.
Cook agreed with the assessment that the book is coming out at a time of heightened interest in gun policy as a result of Lott's foibles. "I think it's been useful in bringing social-science research on gun issues back as a news story," he said. "And this book is full of social-science research on gun issues."
