More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws, Third Edition (Studies in Law and Economics) Third Edition

by John R. Lott Jr. (Author)

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ISBN-13: 978-0226493664

ISBN-10: 0226493660

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On its initial publication in 1998, John R. Lott’s More Guns, Less Crime drew both lavish praise and heated criticism. More than a decade later, it continues to play a key role in ongoing arguments over gun-control laws: despite all the attacks by gun-control advocates, no one has ever been able to refute Lott’s simple, startling conclusion that more guns mean less crime. Relying on the most rigorously comprehensive data analysis ever conducted on crime statistics and right-to-carry laws, the book directly challenges common perceptions about the relationship of guns, crime, and violence. For this third edition, Lott draws on an additional ten years of data—including provocative analysis of the effects of gun bans in Chicago and Washington, D.C—that brings the book fully up to date and further bolsters its central contention.

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Editorial Reviews

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“A compelling book with enough hard evidence that even politicians may have to stop and pay attention. More Guns, Less Crime is an exhaustive analysis of the effect of gun possession on crime rates. . . . Mr. Lott’s book—and the factual arsenals of other pro-gun advocates—are helping to redefine the argument over guns and gun control.”

(James Bovard Wall Street Journal)

“John Lott’s More Guns, Less Crime revives the wisdom of the past by using the latest tools of social science. By constructing careful statistical models and deploying a wealth of crime data he shows that laws permitting the carrying of concealed weapons actually lead to a drop in crime in the jurisdictions that enact them. . . . By providing strong empirical evidence that yet another liberal policy is a cause of the very evil it purports to cure, he has permanently changed the terms of debate on gun control. . . . Lott’s book could hardly be more timely. . . . Lott’s work is a model of the meticulous application of economics and statistics to law and policy.”

(John O. McGinnis National Review)

About the Author

John R. Lott, Jr., is the author five books, including Freedomnomics and Are Predatory Commitments Credible? Who Should the Courts Believe?, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Product details

Publisher : University of Chicago Press; Third edition (May 24, 2010)
Language : English
Paperback : 472 pages
ISBN-10 : 0226493660
ISBN-13 : 978-0226493664
Item Weight : 1.3 pounds
Dimensions : 6 x 1.2 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #783,358 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #420 in Civil Rights
- #1,504 in Criminology (Books)
- #1,534 in General Elections & Political Process

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Platypus

I wanted to disagree with this book, but the data speaks for itself

Reviewed in the United States on April 1, 2019

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I have a friend who makes the sort of extreme and facile arguments that leftists like me learned to scoff at in middle school, stuff like “The answer to school shootings it to arm the teachers!” or “If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns!”. Turns out I was dead wrong about everything I thought I knew about gun statistics. Although the US has high gun ownership and high gun deaths, the relationship breaks down at the county level; counties that have enacted concealed-carry laws have less of nearly all crimes, and this is an effect that is statistically significant in nearly all times and places. It is an effect that can be directly attributed to the loosening of gun ownership laws. Waiting periods, training requirements, and gun-free zones all lead to more crime, not less. The fact that the US has both high gun crimes and high gun ownership despite gun ownership being negatively correlated with gun crime at the county level seems to be a perfect example of Simpson’s Paradox (where a correlation is made to flip its sign by the presence of a lurking third variable). For whatever reasons, the US is a violent place, which is captured in aggregate gun crime stats, but nevertheless, crime falls when more Americans carry guns. Most pro-gun arguments are, in fact, spot on, are backed by fairly unambiguous data. Guys like John Donohue at the NBER have spent their entire careers falsely claiming to rebut Lott’s data. The most recent edition of this book exhaustively steps through the criticism. One crucial rebuttal to the rebuttals is that licensed gun owners commit gun crimes at rates shockingly close to zero. To credit concealed carry laws with substantial increases in gun crime, you would therefore have to believe that more than 99% of gun crimes committed by licensed gun owners go unsolved. Another memorable factoid is that accidental gun deaths number in the hundreds annually. They’re vivid, but they’re massively outweighed by the reduction in murder that attends increases in concealed carry permits.

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Candid ReviewerTop Contributor: Photography

Most comprehensive crime study ever conducted--devastating to gun control advocates

Reviewed in the United States on May 12, 2013

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First, some background about me: I am a Ph.D.-holder and tenured professor whose immersion in the insular politics of academia had led me to harbor many negative perceptions about firearms. Though I was never staunchly "anti-gun," I was not a gun owner, did not understand the appeal of firearms, and generally believed that gun control legislation was only common sense. That changed four years ago when I (finally) decided to look into the data on guns, crime, and public safety for myself. I am a trained researcher, but I conducted my research for personal not professional reasons. My wife was pregnant and I wanted hard facts--not talking point from the political parties--so I could make an informed decision about what to teach my children about firearms, and whether it would be prudent or dangerous to have one in our house.

I was drawn into that research almost immediately by the sheer force of my own disbelief. I discovered fact after fact that starkly disproved the claims and "facts" so many teachers and colleagues had expressed about firearms and their relationship to violence, and which, during my long trip through academia, had led me to believe stricter gun control was just plain common sense. For two years, I read thousands of pages of information, starting with raw data from the FBI and CDC so that I would be better able to assess the claims I subsequently read in books, peer-reviewed journals, news publications, blogs, and so forth. In the course of that research, I came across numerous references to John Lott's studies, but so many of them suggested there were "fatal flaws" in his methodology (and questions about his motives) that I never bothered to read him. I simply assumed based on the sheer number of such comments that his work was indeed more propaganda than serious study. Nonetheless, I turned up enough information over the course of two years to completely change my view about guns. I now believe wholeheartedly in the right to carry, the wisdom of the 2nd Amendment, the particularly important benefits of concealed carry for women, and the notion that more firearms in law-abiding hands does make society demonstrably safer.

Now that I have finally read John Lott's "More Guns, Less Crime" (3rd edition, 2010), I am ashamed that I did not consult it earlier instead of accepting at face value the facile criticisms of his work. Lott's research and claims are astonishingly thorough--meticulously explained and documented. At every turn, he (accurately and clearly) explains the challenges, assumptions, and variables that inform his findings. Often, just to cover his bases, he runs the data with, and then without, certain questionable variables (arrest rates, county sizes, etc.). Again and again, he shows that with only slight variations in the magnitude of the results, more concealed carry permits equals less violent crime (murder, rape, aggravated assault, and robberies involving direct contact with the victim, such as muggings). He also observes that those permits may contribute to a smaller "substitution effect" that displaces criminal activity into less-confrontational forms, such as property theft. On all counts, this constitutes powerful evidence that the likely presence of a defensive firearm has a statistically significant deterrence effect on criminal behavior. More concealed carry permits lead to a net decline in assaults and deaths, and a net decline in the financial costs to society. Moreover, these benefits apply to all citizens--not just those who are armed--and they increase over time, as the number of carry permits rises. They also have the greatest positive impact on African Americans and women.

Why should you take Lott's study seriously? Because it is the most comprehensive study of crime--let alone firearms--ever conducted. In retrospect, I am stunned that any commentator has dared to fault the quality of his data. If anything can be said for Lott, it is that he is meticulous in recognizing and accounting for the variables at stake. Indeed, like a responsible analyst testing a hypothesis with appropriate rigor, he tends to control in ways that actually minimize (i.e., underestimate, and perhaps even artificially suppress) the benefits of non-discretionary ("shall issue") concealed carry laws. His is the only gun control study I've seen that takes all counties into consideration (not some selective sample) and then meticulously controls for population density, arrest rates, rising/falling trends in crime prior to the passing of the carry laws, demographic factors, the number of permits issued, and so forth. Although his expansive, county-level approach is clearly the most precise way to analyze the impact of carry laws, he also consistently re-runs the regressions using state-level (aggregate) data to show that, while the precise results vary, the trends remain the same: more guns, less crime. Indeed, the scope and depth of his study is so far beyond any other peer-reviewed study of guns I've ever encountered that any blanket dismissal either of his findings or his methodology is manifestly disingenuous.

Of course, given the amount of criticism his work has received, Lott is (rightly) concerned to defend his integrity as a scholar. His seventh chapter thus quotes a series of 23 direct criticisms by other academics--each of which he capably rebuts. Whenever possible, Lott first politely plays devil's advocate: re-running his regressions in the alternative manner some critics have suggested, only to show that the results consistently yield the same conclusion: more guns, less crime. He also exposes some critics' blatant ignorance of certain statistical categories (such as what it means for victims to "know" their shooters) and then lays bare salient points or critical factors those critics ignore. One devastating effect of these clear, well-reasoned rebuttals is to expose the patently un-scientific anti-gun bias that drives most critical "concerns" about Lott's study. Yet Lott never dispenses with civility or stoops to base political jabs. A few times, he briefly speculates on the kinds of credible concerns that could be raised about his work--politely leaving it for the reader to note, in unflattering contrast, that the criticisms that have actually been leveled at him fall very short of that standard. Ever the responsible scholar, he chiefly defends his integrity by clarifying his robust methodology and letting the data speak for itself.

I can't say enough about the importance of this book. Do not trust the claim that Lott's work has been "discredited", "fatally flawed," or "funded by the gun lobby." Lott explicitly refutes those attacks in this book, and I have verified to my own satisfaction that those are indeed false claims designed to deflect attention away from his compelling pro-gun findings. Read this book for yourself. It matches the findings of my own personal two-year study into these issues, though I might have saved myself a lot of time and work by consulting Lott's book sooner. He explains the variables and various analytical concepts very clearly (the substitution effect, the endogeneity problem, the perils of looking only at raw measures instead of slopes/trends over time, etc.). This diligent effort to empower (non-expert) readers by allowing them to understand what is at stake in the measures before delving into the data is one clear sign that his intention is to inform readers truthfully, not manipulate their political views. His habit of checking, re-checking, and checking his regressions again--verifying how the results change as certain variables are included or excluded--is another good sign. And yet another is the modest and precise way he reports his results: never engaging in bombastic or exaggerated claims, but always frankly acknowledging the limits of what can be reasonably concluded from the data. By the end of the book, you will understand many of the flawed assumptions and misunderstandings which underlie the oft-cited "evidence" that stricter gun control enhances public safety.

If you're anti-gun and Lott's book does not give you pause and force you to reconsider the potential benefits of an armed society, you either did not read the book with an open mind, or you do not know how to distinguish a precisely-reasoned argument from a merely political one.

Well done Mr. Lott. I cannot fathom the amount of energy and intellectual rigor you must have invested in this massive project, but I am grateful to you for this impressive and substantial contribution to knowledge.

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Mr. Francis A. King

A mess of a book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 30, 2016

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I bought the book in the hope that I would discover a new insight. But the book is a mess. John Lott has taken some data and done some unspecified statistics on it. I can't be sure, but it seems he's done a multi-variate linear regression, without justification for this approach. Then he repeated this process. There are tables in the kindle version, but I can't read them properly. I quit half way through, and simply cannot recommend it. It's a pity, because his suggestion, that in the USA at least, concealed carry leads to lower fatalities, is an interesting one.

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Amazon Customer

a classic John R Lotts books are great puts the pro-gun side in a positive light its ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 15, 2018

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a classic John R Lotts books are great puts the pro-gun side in a positive light its just unfortunate anti-gun poeple typically don't read books especially like this which is why properly why there anti-gun as the facts are on the side of pro-gun people no the anti's

Krzysztof

First glance review

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 8, 2017

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Lots of statistical information and level headed writing. Good book so far. I will publish a more detiailed review after i finish reading :D

Alex Aslanian

A great weapon in your armoury when debating liberals

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 13, 2013

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Thoroughly well-researched book explaining how more liberal gun laws (easier access) reduces crime. You will find yourself making great use of any highlighting feature your reading device may have, with so many great easy-to-understand facts detailing this finding. Unfortunately though, there is much too little focus on international crime comparisons for my liking, given this is probably the strongest argument liberals can point to.

Amazon Customer

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 23, 2016

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