Control (13 page)

—ALAN DERSHOWITZ
,
January 7, 2013

Professor Dershowitz might be an extremely well-known, well-spoken, and brilliant professor, but he is a
lawyer,
not a statistician. He seems to have very little clue as to what he is talking about when it comes to the gun debate and the effects different laws have had in different places.

Despite his convincing rhetoric, the truth is that Dershowitz has never written a statistical paper. A careful listener should notice that he merely makes grandiose assertions and avoids referencing the precise studies or numbers that would back them up. If he knows the FBI data so well, then why doesn’t he tell us the actual numbers instead of just saying that everything else is wrong?

We’ll get back to that data in a second, but first I have to hand it to Dershowitz for his suggestion that we should create a commission to settle this. I mean, what could go possibly go wrong with that? We just find ten totally independent, well-respected scientists who have absolutely no preconceived notions about guns or political agendas. That should be easy.

This commission idea is a pretty well-known method of quelling debate.
Look at what the commission said; case closed!
I have no doubt that many control advocates would love nothing more than to get their hands on a final commission report recommending draconian restrictions or outright gun bans. In fact, the only way these people can win this argument is by claiming that the science is settled.

Dershowitz also conveniently seems to forget that, as I mentioned earlier, a National Academy of Sciences commission already has taken a hard look at the data. During the final days of the Clinton administration this panel reviewed 253 journal articles, 99 books, and 43 government publications, along with some of its own empirical work on firearms and violence. Their 2004 report was not able to identify a single gun control regulation (for example, background checks, gun buybacks, assault weapon bans, limits on gun sales, regulating gun dealers)
that clearly reduced violent crime, suicide, or accidents.

Considering the work this panel has already done, it’s obvious that Dershowitz doesn’t want a commission; he wants a commission that will reach a different conclusion.

But let’s put all of that aside and instead look at the crux of his argument, which is that all the data is wrong and all the studies are biased.

First, since he specifically said he “knows” and “teaches” the FBI data, we’ll start there. The FBI’s
Uniform Crime Reports
detail the number of “Firearms-Related Murder Victims” per capita. If the “notion that more guns, less crime” is the lie that Dershowitz claims it is, then we should very clearly see this firearm murder rate moving higher through the years as more and more firearms make their way out into the public.

But exactly the opposite happens.

Below is a table that lists the best government estimates of the
number of firearms in America along with the per capita firearm murder statistics from the FBI.

Notice anything strange about those numbers? The firearm murder rate keeps falling even as the number of total firearms in America keeps rising.

I understand enough about statistics to know that a table
like this is prone to all sorts of problems. The Dershowitzes of the world would say that you can’t just look at overall trends like this because you have to control for all those variables he alluded to in his other quote. Fine, and that’s been done plenty of times in other peer-reviewed studies—but this data, covering eighteen years of history and using only the most respected federal sources, sure puts, to use a term that Dershowitz knows well, the burden of proof squarely back on those who make the claim that the correlation between these numbers is actually the
complete opposite
of what the FBI data shows.

This correlation can also be found in states, like Virginia, where the total number of firearms per 100,000 residents was up 63 percent over five years, but where total gun-related violent crimes fell 27 percent over that same period. Virginia Commonwealth University professor Thomas Baker, who ran the study, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that the data, “
seems to point away from the premise that more guns leads to more crime, at least in Virginia . . . . From my personal point of view, I would say the data is pretty overwhelming.”

One way that researchers determine the effectiveness of gun control is by looking at right-to-carry (also sometimes known as “concealed carry”) laws. These are basically laws that allow, with some exceptions, people to keep a weapon on them in public areas. There are several varieties of these laws, including “unrestricted” (no permitting required), “shall-issue” (you need a permit but it’s pretty much a formality—governing bodies are not allowed to use their own discretion), and “may-issue” (a permit is necessary and may be granted only if you meet certain requirements or conditions).

A lot of sophisticated studies have been done on this topic and they virtually all reached the same conclusion: violent crime falls after right-to-carry laws are adopted, with
bigger drops the longer the right-to-carry laws are in effect.

While there is tons of evidence to support this conclusion, some of the most interesting is produced when you compare changes in crime rates in adjacent counties on opposite sides of state borders. In general, the county in the state that adopts a right-to-carry law sees a drop in violent crime, while the adjacent county
in the state without the right-to-carry law sees a slight increase.

The evidence that right-to-carry laws work is so persuasive that someone attempting to identify some other factor that’s responsible for the results would have to answer these questions:

—Why does the impact of this new factor increase over time?

—Why is this new factor so well correlated with the rate at which right-to-carry permits are issued in different states?

—Why would this new factor have a greater impact on
violent crime relative to property crime and on individual
murders relative to mass (multiple-victim) public homicides?

—Why does this new factor affect adjacent counties on opposite sides of state borders differently?

Various academic scholars have studied the impact of letting citizens carry concealed handguns on crime rates. Eighteen recent studies have found that right-to-carry laws deter violent crime. Ten
studies have claimed either small benefits or no effect.

Dershowitz, however, is not convinced. He apparently believes that the findings below, from those eighteen different studies (in addition to the opinion from James Q. Wilson that was previously quoted) performed by different scholars at different times, were all bought and paid for by the gun lobby.

• John Lott and John Whitley find that “
the longer a right-to-carry law is in effect, the greater the drop in crime.”

• The third edition of John Lott’s
More Guns, Less Crime
found that the states which issued the most permits had the biggest drops in violent crime rates. Lott also found: “By any measure,
concealed-handgun permit holders are extremely law abiding.”

• Economists Florenz Plassmann and Nicolaus Tideman found that “
right-to-carry laws do help on average to reduce the number of these crimes.”

• Carl Moody, chair of the economics department at the College of William and Mary at the time of the study, said his findings “confirm and
reinforce the basic findings of the original Lott and [David] Mustard study.”

• In another paper that studies county crime rates from 1977 until 2000, coauthored by Moody and attorney and sociologist Thomas Marvell, the authors write that “the evidence, such as it is, seems to support the hypothesis that the shall-issue law is generally beneficial with respect to its
overall long run effect on crime.”

• Economists Eric Helland and Alex Tabarrok studied county crime rates from 1977 to 2000 and concluded that “shall-issue laws cause a large and significant drop in the murder trend rate” and that “there is considerable support for the hypothesis that shall-issue laws cause criminals to substitute away from
crimes against persons and towards crimes against property.”

• David Olson, a professor of criminal justice at Loyola University Chicago, and Michael Maltz, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago, found “a
decrease in total homicides” driven by a drop in gun killings.

• 
Bruce Benson, a Florida State economics professor, and social scientist Brent Mast found that their results “are virtually identical to those in [Lott and Mustard’s study].”

These researchers have used a variety of approaches: different statistical techniques, different data sets, different control variables, or a variety of specifications. Yet, despite all these alternative setups, the general conclusion is the same:
right-to-carry laws reduce violent crime.

Some studies have reached the opposite conclusion. A 2011 paper published in
American Law and Economics Review
claimed, “the most consistent, albeit not uniform, finding to emerge from both the state and county panel data models conducted over the entire 1977–2006 period with and without state trends and using three different specifications is that aggravated assault rises when RTC laws are adopted. For every other crime category, there is little or
no indication of any consistent RTC impact on crime.”

Sounds impressive, except that a review of this study by four researchers, including John Lott, found the results to be based on a data set that included significant errors (for example, it accidentally counted the same county seventy-three times), as well as a significant arrest-rate error that
severely biased the results toward finding a negative effect from right-to-carry laws.
A later addendum to this paper admitted the errors and claimed that the underlying results were still valid. But researchers like John Lott, who routinely confirm the findings of other studies in this field,
disagree, and have not been provided access to the data used to reach these conclusions.

“I have been stunned by the sheer political cowardice of so many politicians in America who seem just terrified of saying anything that the NRA may object to. The NRA has four million members. America has 310 million people living here. I just don’t understand why everybody is so coward[ly] about publicly debating this and
trying to get exactly the measures in place that you’ve [Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal] just suggested.”

—PIERS MORGAN
,
December 20, 2012

“Let’s talk political reality. I don’t have to tell you, the NRA has a lot of clout on Capitol Hill. In the last election cycle, they contributed $20 million to campaigns last year. Fifty percent of the members of the new
Congress have an A-rating from the NRA.”

—CHRIS WALLACE
,
February 3, 2013

It is often hard for gun control advocates to accept that everyone wants the same thing: to save lives and reduce violence. President Obama believes that those “pundits and politicians and special interest lobbyists” who oppose his gun control regulations do so “because they want to gin up fear or higher ratings or revenue for themselves.” That they will do “everything they can to block any commonsense reform” that is necessary “
to protect our communities and our kids.”

I take that not only as a personal insult, but as akin to the president essentially saying that I put ratings and profit above the lives of children. Nothing could be further from the truth, and it’s those kinds of reckless statements that make both sides dig in their heels. After all, I may believe that Obama’s views on guns are dangerous and that his policies endanger public safety, but that’s quite a bit different from accusing him of personally benefiting from the deaths of innocent children.