REASON * January 2000
Cold Comfort
Economist John Lott discusses the benefits of guns--and the hazards
of pointing them out.
Interviewed by Jacob Sullum and Michael W. Lynch
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: How did you become interested in guns?
John R. Lott Jr.: About six years ago, I was teaching a class
dealing with crime issues at the
University of Pennsylvania, and it dawned on me that my students
would be interested in some papers
on gun control. It forced me to look at the literature systematically
to decide what papers to assign to
the class. I was shocked by how poorly done the existing research
on guns and crime was.
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: What has been the most gratifying response to the book?
Do you know of any criminologists
whose views have been changed by your research?
Lott: Some well-known people like [University of Pennsylvania
criminologist] John DiIulio and
[UCLA political scientist] James Q. Wilson have said very nice
things about the study. I think it's
caused DiIulio to look at these issues differently, and there
are other criminologists I know of who have
been amazed by how strong the data are. I've done lots of empirical
studies, and the regularities that
you see here, in terms of the drops in violent crimes right after
these laws go into effect, are very
dramatic.
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: The thrust of your argument in More Guns, Less Crime
is easy enough to understand. But
the details of the evidence you cite are hard to follow for anyone
who is not trained in econometrics.
Does it bother you that people who support the right to keep and
bear arms are apt to accept your
conclusions at face value, while those who are inclined to support
gun control will tend to reject your
findings, even though few people in either group are equipped
to evaluate the evidence?
Lott: My guess is that [my critics] assume that the vast majority
of people who hear their claims are
not going to even look at the book. So they say, "Lott didn't
account for poverty." Or they say, "Lott
didn't account for other types of gun laws." Those are things
that are easy to evaluate: Either I did, or I
didn't. But I think they feel that they can get away with making
those claims, because it'll be only a tiny
fraction of 1 percent who will go and buy the book or get it from
the library. I've never been involved in
a debate like this, because in your normal academic debate, where
there are 10 people involved and
they've all read the paper, if somebody says, "Professor
X didn't account for other gun laws,"
everybody else in the room would laugh, because they would know
it was an absurd claim.
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: Your analysis shows that liberal carry permit policies
are associated with lower crime rates
even after controlling for a variety of factors that might also
have an impact on crime. In the book you
concede that some other variable that you did not consider could
be responsible for this association.
Yet at the end of the book, you write, "Will allowing law-abiding
citizens to carry concealed handguns
save lives? The answer is yes, it will." Do statements like
that go too far?
Lott: I don't think so. That's one of the last sentences in
the book, and at that point the evidence is
pretty overwhelming. There are different types of information,
and they're all pointing in the same
direction.
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: A review of your book in The American Prospect claims
that "his results are skewed by the
inclusion of data from tiny counties with trivial rates of violent
crime. In fact, when you consider only
large counties and exclude Florida from the sample, his case completely
falls apart." How do you
respond?
Lott: When you drop out counties with fewer than 100,000 people,
if anything it actually increases the
size of the effect. What [the reviewer is] saying is that if you
not only drop out counties with fewer than
100,000 people--which is 86 percent of the counties in the sample,
so it's not just a few small counties
that we're talking about--but also drop out Florida, then the
changes in two of the violent crime
categories, when you're just looking at the simple before-and-after
averages, aren't statistically
significant. But the results still imply a drop, and for robberies
and aggravated assaults you still get a
drop that's statistically significant.
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: University of Florida criminologist Gary Kleck recently
told The Salt Lake Tribune that
"Lott has convincingly demonstrated there is no substantial
detriment" from "shall issue" laws. But he
questioned whether these laws could have as substantial a deterrent
effect as you suggest. Kleck
provided a blurb for your book, and his work is often cited by
opponents of gun control. Why do you
think he has trouble buying your conclusions?
Lott: Gary has had a strong opinion for a long time that, on
net, guns neither reduce or increase crime.
He thinks it's essentially a wash. And I'm not sure I understand
how he comes to that conclusion,
particularly given the survey data that indicate that many more
violent crimes are stopped with guns
than are perpetrated with guns. But it is something that he has
written and felt strongly about for a long
time. Now Gary may think that there's something else that's being
left out that maybe could explain
these changes in crime rates. If he can tell me what that factor
is, I'd be happy to try to test it.
Reason: Do you still hear the argument that you're in the pay
of the gun industry, or has that been
discredited?
Lott: I think the gun control people are going to continue
to bring it up. I've been in debates this year
with people from Handgun Control Inc. and other gun control groups
in which they asserted flat-out
that I've been paid by gun makers to do this study.
Reason: When they raise this charge, how successful are you
in making the point that people should
be able to assess evidence and arguments on their merits and that
your motives don't matter?
Lott: Well, most people aren't going to look at the data. They're
not going to have the data in front of
them. The credibility of the data and the message depends on whether
or not they believe that the
person who's telling them about the data is credible. And I think
the gun control groups feel that it's a
win to the extent that they even divert three minutes of a show
to talking about this issue. Even if it
doesn't stick in people's minds, it's still three minutes that
I couldn't talk about something else.
Reason: In a working paper you wrote with University of Chicago
law professor William Landes
[available at papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=161637], you
conclude that "shall issue" laws are
especially effective at preventing mass public shootings. Given
that the people who commit these crimes
seem to be pretty unbalanced, if not suicidal, how does the deterrent
work?
Lott: Most of these attacks do end in the death of the attackers
themselves, frequently from suicide,
but also because they're killed by others. But part of what's
motivating them is the desire to harm other
people, and to the extent that you can take that away from them,
I think you reduce their incentive to
engage in these attacks. Whether they do it just because they
intrinsically value killing people or
whether they do it because of the publicity, the fact that there
might be a citizen there who can stop
them well before the police are able to arrive takes away, in
their warped minds, some of the gain from
the crime, and stops a lot of them from doing it.
Reason: You often say, based on surveys, that Americans use
guns to fend off criminals more than 2
million times a year. But in the book, you note that people who
report incidents of armed self-defense
could be mistaken or lying. How big a problem is that, and how
confident can we be that the true
number is more than 2 million?
Lott: Well, 2 million is the average of the various surveys.
Different problems may plague different
surveys, and the problems can go in both directions. You may have
questions that weed out people
who shouldn't be weeded out.
Reason: Like "Do you own a gun?"
Lott: Or it could be you ask them "Has a crime been committed
against you?" before you ask them
whether they've used a gun defensively.
Reason: And they might not consider it a crime if it wasn't completed?
Lott: Right. And so, we have errors that can exist on both
sides....But that's the only type of evidence
that we have on this....The most striking thing to me is the comparison
between the results from these
surveys and [survey data on] the number of violent crimes that
are committed with guns each year. You
see many more crimes that are averted by people who defend themselves
with guns. I think that
difference--even though both sets of numbers can be tainted for
all the same reasons--is what's striking.
Reason: You say that resistance with a gun is the safest option
when confronted by a criminal. What's
the basis for that conclusion?
Lott: You hear claims from time to time that people should
behave passively when they're confronted
by a criminal. And if you push people on that, they'll refer to
something called the National Crime
Victimization Survey, a government project that surveys about
50,000 households each year. If you
compare passive behavior to all forms of active resistance lumped
together, passive behavior is indeed
slightly safer than active resistance. But that's very misleading,
because under the heading of active
resistance you're lumping together things like using your fist,
yelling and screaming, running away, using
Mace, a baseball bat, a knife, or a gun. Some of those actions
are indeed much more dangerous than
passive behavior. But some are much safer.
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: Why does the mainstream press seem to downplay the value of armed self-defense?
Lott: One question is, Why don't they report people using guns
defensively? If I have two stories, one
where there's a dead body on the ground vs. another where, say,
a woman has brandished a gun and a
would-be rapist or murderer has run away, with no shots fired
and no dead body on the ground, it's
pretty obvious to me which one of those is going to be considered
more newsworthy. It doesn't require
any conspiracy. Now if we care about policy, if we care about
what types of actions are going to save
the most lives, or prevent the most crimes, we want to look at
both of those cases: not only the
newsworthy bad events but the bad events that never become newsworthy
because they don't occur.
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: You've said that if Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, who
filed one of the first city-sponsored
gun lawsuits, really believes guns are so bad, he ought to take
them away from his bodyguards. Explain
that comment.
Lott: Daley has been arguing that there's no benefit from owning
guns. Yet he has a whole set of
full-time bodyguards following him every place he goes. He won't
even think about visiting some of the
more dangerous areas in Chicago without his bodyguards. But there
are poor people who have to live
in those areas, who live there at great risk, and he's not willing
to let them own guns in order to protect
themselves....I view it as very hypocritical, that Daley can understand
the defensive benefits of guns
when it comes to himself, but he's not willing to afford that
same level of protection to the poorest, most
vulnerable people in his city.
Reason: You've pointed out that somebody who gets turned down
for a gun purchase after a
background check may simply get the gun by other means. That's
a legitimate point, but don't you also
have to consider the possibility that people are deterred from
even trying to get a gun because they
know there's going to be a background check and they know they
won't pass it?
Lott: They may just try to get it the illegal way to begin
with. Personally, I don't believe the claims that
the Clinton administration makes about the number of people who
are stopped from buying a gun. My
guess is that to the extent that people are stopped, the vast
majority of them are people who may have
something on their record from 30 years ago, and they don't realize
that it prevents them from buying a
gun. These are people who may pose no risk to anybody. In fact,
that's one of the reasons why I think
there's such a low prosecution rate of those people.
Reason: The feds say they don't have the resources to prosecute.
Lott: I don't think that's it at all. I think you have prosecutorial
discretion. I think that you have a case
where somebody who's 50 years old may have done something as an
18-year-old that was wrong.
The prosecutor looks at it and says, "This guy has been an
upstanding member of the community for 30
years, and he had this one run-in as a teenager. We don't really
think that he intended to violate the
law. We're not going to send the guy to jail for doing this."
Reason: The National Rifle Association criticizes the Justice
Department for not prosecuting enough of
these cases.
Lott: I think that's a mistake. They're also talking about
prosecuting cases where guns were brought
onto school property. My guess is that a prosecutor would bend
over backwards to bring a case
against a juvenile who had brought a gun onto school property.
He doesn't want to not bring the case
and then have something bad happen later on. That would be disastrous
for his career.
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: You've criticized the NRA for doing a poor job of making
its case. What should it be doing
differently?
Lott: My biggest complaint with the NRA is that they're too
defensive. It seems to me that some of the
[mass shootings] that have occurred are a result of gun laws that
are already on the books. Rather than
talking about what new law should be put in place, we should ask
to what extent have well-intentioned
laws in the past caused us to get to point where we are right
now.
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: Some advocates of gun rights base their claims mainly
on the Second Amendment, while
others offer a more utilitarian argument. Which approach is more
effective?
Lott: I understand the constitutional arguments, but I think
for the vast majority of people the bottom
line is whether the presence of guns, on net, saves lives or costs
lives. They may be able to understand
in the abstract that having guns owned by civilians is some type
of restraint on government, but I don't
think most of them view that as a problem that they're facing
any time soon. For them the bottom line
is, What will save lives? And so I think that's where you have
to argue.
(GUN CONTROL)
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