Lott has an op-ed in the New York Post where he comments on the recent NYC City Hall shooting. Lott seems to believe that concealed handguns would have prevented the shooting. Lott’s logic is especially hard to follow in this case—the victim was actually carrying a concealed handgun and the killer was shot almost immediately by a police officer. Having more people with concealed handguns present could not have prevented this crime, and might have led to more people getting shot in the general confusion. On the other hand, the policy that Lott dismisses, requiring everyone to pass through metal detectors, could have prevented this shooting.
Lott also claims, yet again:
Examining all the multiple-victim public shootings from 1977 to 1999 shows that, on average, states that adopt right-to-carry laws experience a 60 percent drop in the rate at which the attacks occur, and a 78 percent drop in the rate at which people are killed or injured from such attacks.As usual, Lott fails to mention the results of the study by Duwe et al, which found no support for the hypothesis that such laws decrease mass public shootings. (He’s only ever mentioned it once, and then to claim that their study “gets the same results I do”.)
Lott continues:
the vast majority of academic research finds that concealed handguns reduce violent crime generally.This is not true. The table below shows that there are more works that don’t find that they reduce violent crime. Note also that fully half of the ones finding that they reduce crime have Lott as an author, and that Michael Maltz, the only researcher with papers on both sides of the table has repudiated the paper that found that carry laws reduced crime. In any case, not all papers should be weighted equally, and Ayres and Donohue, the most comprehensive paper, found that carry laws tended to increase violent crime.
| works that do not find that concealed handguns generally reduce violent crime | works that do find that concealed handguns generally reduce violent crime |
|---|---|
| Alschuler, Two Guns, Four Guns, Six Guns, More Guns: Does Arming the Public Reduce Crime? Valparaiso University Law Review (1997) link | Bartley and Cohen, The effect of concealed weapons laws—an extreme bound analysis. Economic Inquiry (1998) link |
| Ayres and Donohue, Shooting Down the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis. Stanford Law Review (2003) link | Bronars and Lott, Criminal Deterrence, Geographic Spillovers, and Right-to-Carry Laws American Economic Review (1998) link |
| Ayres and Donohue, The Latest Misfires in Support of the “More Guns, Less Crime” Hypothesis Stanford Law Review (2003) link | Lott, Plassmann and Whitley, Confirming “More Guns, Less Crime” Stanford Law Review (2003) link |
| Black and Nagin, Do Right-to-carry Laws Deter Violent Crime? Journal of Legal Studies (1998)link | Olson and Maltz, Right-to-Carry Concealed Weapon Laws and Homicide in Large U.S. Counties: The Effect on Weapon Types, Victim Characteristics, and Victim-Offender Relationships Journal of Law & Economics (2001) link |
| Rubin and Dezhbakhsh, The Effect of Concealed Handgun Laws on Crime: Beyond the Dummy Variables. International Review of Law and Economics link draft | Plassmann and Tideman, Does the Right to Carry Concealed Handguns Deter Countable Crimes? Only a Count Analysis Can Say Journal of Law & Economics (2001) link |
| Duggan, More Guns, More Crime. Journal of Political Economy (2001) link | Lott, More Guns, Less Crime |
| Harrison, Kennison, and Macedon, Crime and Concealed Gun Laws: A Reconsideration unpublished link | Lott and Mustard, Crime, deterrence, and right-to-carry concealed handguns. Journal of Legal Studies (1997) link |
| Helland and Tabarrok, Using Placebo Laws to Test “More Guns, Less Crime” link (draft) | Moody, Testing for the Effects of Concealed Weapons Laws: Specification Errors and Robustness Journal of Law & Economics (2001) link |
| Goertzel, Myths of Murder and Multiple Regression. The Skeptical Inquirer (2002) link | |
| Hood and Neeley, Packin’ in the Hood?: Examining Assumptions of Concealed-Handgun Research. Social Science Quarterly (2000) link | |
| Kovandzic and Marvell, Right-to-carry Concealed Handguns and Violent Crime: Crime Control Through Gun Decontrol? Criminology & Public Policy (2003) draft | |
| Ludwig, Concealed-gun-carrying Laws and Violent Crime—Evidence from State Panel Data. International Review of Law and Economics (1998) link | |
| McDowall, Loftin and Wiersema, Easing Concealed-Firearm Laws: Effects on Homicide in Three States Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (1995) link | |
| Maltz and Targonski,A Note on the use of County-level UCR Data. Journal of Quantitative Criminology (2002) link | |
| Daniel W. Webster, Jon S. Vernick, Jens Ludwig, and Kathleen J. Lester. Flawed Gun Policy Research Could Endanger Public Safety. American Journal of Public Health (1997) link | |
| Zimring and Hawkins,Concealed Handguns: The Counterfeit Deterrent. The Responsive Community (1997) link |
Lott also claims:
Despite all the national studies that have been done, there is not a single refereed academic journal publication concluding the opposite.How clever. Since Ayres and Donohue’s article was published in the Stanford Law Review, which is not refereed, Lott gets to ignore it. Of course earlier in his piece, Lott cites his own research on multiple-victim public shootings which has not been published in a journal, let alone a refereed one, while ignoring Duwe et al’s study which was published in a refereed journal.
Update: Following a discussion with David Friedman I changed the title of the first column. It used to say “concealed handguns do not reduce violent crime”. I changed it because given the way statistical tests work, we can’t prove that concealed guns don’t reduce crime. Getting a “no result” on a statistical test doesn’t prove that the null hypothesis is true. It does mean that you can’t conclude that guns reduce crime.