More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws

More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws, by John R. Lott Jr. (Chicago, 225 pp., $23)

Gun control remains as much a mainstay of the liberal agenda today as welfare was in the Seventies and Eighties. Both policies have the political advantage of promising simple solutions to intractable social problems. We are told that poverty can be eliminated simply by giving the poor more money and that violence can be contained simply by eliminating the private ownership of guns. Unfortunately, both ideas ignore hard truths about human behavior that cannot be changed by government fiat. Welfare creates a culture of dependency because it reduces the incentives of the poor to work. Gun control does not decrease gun ownership by criminals but instead reduces their incentives to refrain from violence because it decreases the supply of armed law-abiding citizens who might resist them. As a result welfare is likely to lead to an increase in poverty and gun control is likely to lead to an increase in crime.

Such facts about human nature were so intuitively clear to earlier statesmen that nineteenth-century America had neither substantial government welfare nor gun control. Today, however, conservatives must work continuously to recover the verities of previous centuries in order to prevent the disasters to which new forms of social engineering must ultimately lead.

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. Mr. Lott has thus done to gun control what Charles Murray did to welfare payments in Losing Ground. 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. Indeed, one measure of his success is the campaign of ad hominem vituperation to which he has already been subjected, including the false claim that his work is funded by the firearms industry. (See "Trigger Happy," NR, June 22, p. 49.)

One of the many strengths of Lott's approach is that he turns what gun-control advocates see as their strongest arguments into powerful weapons against them. Such advocates contend that permitting any sane and law abiding adult to carry a concealed weapon is the very worst kind of weapons regime, but in fact it turns out to be the very best at deterring crime. When weapons are not visible, criminals become less bold, because they cannot know whether any potential victim is armed.

Gun-control enthusiasts also imply that such laws are sops to angry rednecks. This too turns out to be false. In fact, economic reasoning suggests, and statistics confirm, that they protect women and minorities more than white males. Women on average are weaker and more vulnerable to attack than men; the possibility that a woman may have a gun thus provides her with greater marginal deterrence. Since minorities are likelier than whites on average to live in places with high crime rates, concealed-gun laws provide them with greater than average benefit.

Lott's book could hardly be more timely. While the recent schoolyard massacres in the South and Northwest have inevitably sparked calls for more gun control, Lott's careful review of mass killings shows that laws permitting concealed weapons prevent more such tragedies than they cause. This finding casts doubt on the prudence of laws that keep guns out of the hands of responsible adults such as teachers simply because they work at a school. By designating schools as gun-free zones we effectively post a placard on their doors declaring that criminals face little risk of armed resistance within their precincts.

Finally, Lott intriguingly suggests that even in the jurisdictions which allow concealed weapons, the price of gun permits may be too high. Since gun owners who are not criminals benefit not only themselves but the surrounding community, a lower price would better reflect the attendant social benefits.

Lott's work is a model of the meticulous application of economics and statistics to law and policy. Beyond its specific support for the right to bear arms, this book more generally underscores the continued importance of the conservative empirical tradition in social thought that began with David Hume and Adam Smith. By amassing a lot of little facts about contemporary life such scientists provide further confirmation of the large and enduring truths about the human condition that remain the surest guide to sound social policy.

Mr. McGinnis is a professor of law at Cardozo Law School, Yeshiva University, in New York City.

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