Checked with New River Media, the distributor of Think Tank and they sent me a transcript. It follows, but is l-o-n-g. Sorry, I don't know how to attach it and they didn't give me a URL.
----------------------------------------
THINK TANK
Saturday, October 7, 2000
ANNOUNCER: Funding for Think Tank is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation.
(Musical break.)
MR. WATTENBERG: Hello, I'm Ben Wattenberg. Widely televised images of youth gun violence in a crucial election year have pushed gun control to the forefront of American public policy debate. Some say additional legislation can keep guns out of the wrong hands. Others say guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens can actually reduce crime. Might both sides be right?
Think Tank is joined by: John Lott, senior research scholar at Yale Law School, and author of the newly updated More Guns Less Crime, Understanding Crime And Gun Control Laws; Jens Ludwig, assistant professor of public policy at Georgetown University and co-author of the forthcoming Gun Violence, The Real Costs; and Rebecca Peters, senior justice fellow at the Open Society Institute's center on crime communities and culture. The topic before the house, more guns more crime or less, this week on Think Tank.
(Musical break.)
MR. WATTENBERG: Last month's Million Mom March brought tens of thousands to the National Mall to voice support for tougher gun control legislation. A few weeks later the National Rifle Association held its annual convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, pledging to protect the Second Amendment by defeating Al Gore in November.
CHARLTON HESTON (From video): And especially for you Mr. Gore, from my cold dead hands.
MR. WATTENBERG: But, the other side argues that a George W. Bush administration would be too friendly with the NRA.
(Commercial shown.)
MR. WATTENBERG: Despite all these political maneuverings the American public is pretty evenly split over which candidate will do a better job handling the issue of gun control. While the national debate over gun policy rages on, most of the action has been at the state level. Prior to 1987 only seven states had shall issue concealed carry laws, now there are about 31 states that grant permits to carry concealed weapons on a non-discretionary basis. Supporters say concealed carry laws cut crime. So two positions, more guns more crime, or more guns less crime. Now, that is a polar argument, about which we will now talk.
Lady, gentlemen, thank you for joining us, let us begin with you, John Lott. You have written a book called More Guns Less Crime, what's it about?
MR. LOTT: Basically you have two arguments, you have the bad things that can happen, but you also have issues of deterrence, the fact that just as you can deter criminals with higher arrest rates, or higher conviction rates, or longer prison sentences, the fact that a would-be victim might be able to defend themselves might cause some criminals not to attack.
There's also the issue of what's the safest course of action that someone should take when they're confronted by a criminal. And what you find consistently is that by far the safest course of action is to have a gun. Women who behave passively, for example, are 2.5 times more likely to end up being seriously injured than a woman who has a gun. Men benefit, but by not as much. Men who behave passively are about 1.4 times more likely to end up being seriously injured than a man who has a gun. The reason why women benefit so much more is simply because you're almost always talking about a male criminal doing the attacking. In the case of a female victim there's a large strength differential that exists there.
MR. WATTENBERG: And a gun is, as they used to say in the old gangster movies, an equalizer.
MR. LOTT: An equalizer.
MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. So you have made this case of deterrence, or potential deterrence, and it is backed up, as I understand it, by a mountain of data, a huge study. And I gather neither of you accept this theory, is that correct? Rebecca, why don't you start, what did he say that's wrong.
MS. PETERS: It doesn't make sense to think that the more guns you have the safer people will be. And I think that sort of commonsense indicator is an important one to take notice of. What we know is that there are far too many guns, and they're far too easily accessible, in situations not just of professional criminals attacking other people, but in much more messy situations of suicides, of unintentional shootings, and also of crimes which really have only been able to come about because a gun was present. The other thing is, and the question of --
MR. WATTENBERG: Let me interrupt you, isn't the argument against gun registration, which I gather you approve of, sure then all the law abiding citizens will have registered weapons, and all the non-law abiding citizens, obviously, are not going to register their weapons and you tilt the balance. It's not as if you're getting the guns out of the hands of bad people?
MS. PETERS: Well, the purpose of gun registration is, of licensing and registration is it recognizes that the guns that are used by criminals began their life as legal products. They were made by a legal, licensed manufacturer, they were sold by a licensed dealer in the first place. It's the fact that there's no record kept, there's no barrier erected between the legal supply of guns and the criminal market. So the purpose of licensing and registration is to put up some kind of a barrier to stem the flow of guns out of the legal pool into the criminal market.
MR. LOTT: How does it do that?
MS. PETERS: Well, because we know that guns used in crime begin their lives as legal products, legally sold in the first place.
MR. WATTENBERG: And you have a paper trail?
MS. PETERS: Exactly, the purpose of licensing and registration is it creates an incentive for the previous owner before he lets go of it, not necessarily directly into the criminal market, but just into the gray market, it makes people keep track.
MR. WATTENBERG: Rebecca, we're going to come back to that. Let me get Jens' --
MR. LUDWIG: Can I follow up on this point?
MR. WATTENBERG: Yes, sure.
MR. LUDWIG: I think the point that Rebecca makes is really an important one, about the gray, or what are known as secondary gun markets. Right now about 40 percent of all gun transactions that occur every year occur in these gray markets. And these kinds of gun transactions are almost completely exempt from the current regulatory system that requires background checks and things like that.
MR. WATTENBERG: The gray market meaning, I bought a registered gun from a dealer, and then I sold it to my good friend John, but that was a personal transaction, he's not a criminal as it happens, but for all I know he might be. And that's the gray market?
MR. LUDWIG: Yes, so the gray market is defined under the current system as any sale that doesn't involve a federally licensed firearm dealer. Not surprisingly, when you look at guns that have been used in crime, and they're traced, you find out that most -- and you also conduct surveys of incarcerated teens and felons, you find that these gray market sales are one of the most important sources of guns used in crime.
MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. Let me just stop right here. Let me ask one question of the two teams here, which is, are your views mutually exclusive. I mean, you could have more registration and more right to carry.
MR. LOTT: Right.
MR. WATTENBERG: And you could have more registration and right to carry. What's wrong with that?
MR. LOTT: Well, they're all separate empirical questions that you have there, and you have to look at it. You look at, we have places in the United States they have registration, we can go and see what it --
MR. WATTENBERG: Total registration?
MR. LOTT: Right, we have not only in Washington, D.C., here, but Chicago, Hawaii has had registration for a couple of decades.
MR. WATTENBERG: Do you have any states that have total registration and right to carry?
MR. LOTT: No, you don't, usually because they are the polar opposites in terms of --
MR. WATTENBERG: But, they are not mutually exclusive.
MR. LOTT: No, they don't have to be.
MR. WATTENBERG: I think if I were given -- if somebody said Ben you write the law, I think that's what I'd write.
MS. PETERS: I think that's right.
MR. WATTENBERG: I'd say let's have registration -- do you have a problem with registration itself?
MR. LOTT: I don't have a problem in theory, the question is what impact has it had on crime. And we have background check rules we can look at. There's no academic study we can look at, by economists or criminologists who show that it's reduced crime. We can look at what's happened in places like Hawaii, or Washington, D.C., or Chicago which have registration, and when you talk to the police there they cannot point to even one crime, not hundreds, they cannot point to one crime that's been solved as a result of registration. And when you talk to them there's a pretty simple reason why they say that --
MR. WATTENBERG: The bad guys don't register their guns.
MR. LOTT: They don't register their guns, and in order for it to work you have to first register the gun, and if they leave the gun at the crime scene then it's possible to track the gun back there. But, you very rarely see guns left at the crime scene, very rarely see them registered, let alone both at the same time, and empirically they just can't even point to even one crime that's been solved as a result of registration.
MS. PETERS: At the moment, where you have across the U.S. such a patchwork of laws, including in many places where there is virtually no gun control laws at all.
MR. WATTENBERG: You've written a paper on this.
MS. PETERS: And we just did a survey of state gun laws across the nation, and what it shows is that there are large areas where there's so little gun control that not only is there no law in those states, but also effectively there's no law in the neighboring states, because when you've got different levels of gun control your system is only as strong as the weakest link.
MR. WATTENBERG: But, you take some that we were just talking before the show, Vermont has no laws, it's one of the lowest crime states in America. What does that tell you?
MS. PETERS: Well, that tells you that gun laws are not the only factor that affects crime. For example, Vermont also has no large cities, and there are other factors at work there. But, if you look at in general the pattern across the country, states that have tighter gun laws tend to have lower rates of gun death.
MR. LOTT: That's not true. The countries, if you look across countries in the world, the countries with the strictest gun control laws have the highest violent crime rates in the world. Look across the United States, those states that have the highest gun ownership rates, or handgun ownership rates have the lowest violent crime rates. And over time, probably much more importantly, those places which have had the largest increases in gun ownership have had the largest relative drops in violent crime.
Countries in the world that have the highest violent crime rates, you know, you look at Brazil has a murder rate five times higher than what we've had here in the United States. They've had gun registration since 1936, over 80 percent of the guns that are sold in the United States would be illegal to be sold in Brazil. You have to demonstrate need to the police before you can even register a gun.
MR. LUDWIG: If you compare the United States to other countries that you might think are more similar to what's going on in America, besides Brazil, so if you compare the United States to other European countries like England and Italy, and Germany and Switzerland, what you see is that for many of the European countries that have overall violent crime rates that are very similar to what you see in the United States. So that suggests that the overall milieu that contributes to crime aren't fundamentally different. But, what you do see is that the fraction of crimes that result on a homicide in the United States is much higher. And at least in my view the most plausible explanation for that is that guns are more readily available.
MR. WATTENBERG: Okay.
MR. LOTT: You know, most murders in the United States, you go to urban areas, about 60 percent of murders in cities over 250,000 are drug gang related. This is a problem that the United States has that a lot of the world is fortunate not to have that we have here. And back to the gang problem, I don't care what types of gun laws you're going to pass, these guys have an important incentive to try to protect their drug turf, and that is a big difference in explaining murder rates across country. If you want to compare the white murder rates between the United States and the white murder rate in Europe, the white murder rate in the United States is very similar. It falls about in the middle of the white murder rate in Europe. The big thing, the horrible problem that we have here in the United States is the huge murder rate that occurs among blacks, particularly in this country in urban areas. It's a shameful problem that we have here. But, that's completely different than this type of gun argument that you're bringing up here, and I don't think that you're going to stop drug gang violence by any of the things that you're talking about there.
MR. WATTENBERG: Let me ask you a question, I will use you, probably unwillingly, as a sort of NRA surrogate, are you against trigger locks?
MR. LOTT: I'm against them because I think it's going to accomplish the opposite. I mean, the NRA is in favor of it apparently.
MR. WATTENBERG: Of trigger locks? Are you in favor of smart guns, where you have to have a special code of your finger print?
MR. LOTT: Yes, if somebody wants to buy that they can go and buy that. But, I think going and passing a law that's going to increase the price of guns by a couple of hundred dollars, it's going to be poor people in high crime urban areas, particularly blacks who are going to be priced out of owning a gun. And you're going to see -- these are among the people who benefit the most from being able to protect themselves. It would be great if the police were there all the time. But, these are the people who are most threatened by crime who can't depend upon the police.
MR. WATTENBERG: A trigger lock wouldn't cost a couple of hundred dollars.
MR. LOTT: No, no, no. I was referring to the smart guns.
MR. WATTENBERG: They were going to give them out -- the smart guns. But, once they're in mass manufacturing it would be like television sets or computers, the price would come way down, wouldn't it?
MR. LOTT: Here's the problem I think that you have even with trigger locks, even the inexpensive ones. Let's look at the data, okay, there are a couple of claims that are made. One is these are going to reduce accidental juvenile gun deaths, they're going to reduce juvenile suicides, and the claim is it may even reduce crime rates. The data indicates that it doesn't reduce juvenile accidental gun deaths or suicides. When you look at the data it's very obvious why that's the case. You're talking about a small number of cases, in 1996 there were 44 accidental gun deaths of children under the age of 10 in the United States.
MR. WATTENBERG: In the whole country 44.
MR. LOTT: Eight involving handguns according to the Centers For Disease Control. When people hear that I think they're thinking about a young child shooting another young child. In fact, that's incredibly rare. Only a few of those cases, literally, nationwide involve a child under ten firing a gun and hitting another child under age ten. The typical person is a male who is in his 20s, who is either a drug addict or an alcoholic, who has a long arrest history for violent crimes, more likely than not have their driver's license suspended. And there are two points you come away with this. One --
MS. PETERS: Those data are not available, to say who is the shooter in accidental shootings, because the NRA has lobbied to have data collection on firearm injury de-funded, we do not have data to show who is shooting.
MR. LOTT: There are lots of academic studies.
MR. WATTENBERG: And what do they say, I want to hear the punch line.
MR. LOTT: Well, there are two things that you get from this. One is, I don't care what type of trigger lock law you're going to pass, you're not going to stop a 24 year old male from accidentally firing his own gun. And the second thing that you have here is that these are not the types of households that are going to obey the laws that you go and put on, they're ones where there's a problem. What you're going to have is it's the law abiding households, where essentially the probability of having an accidental gun shot of a child is essentially zero, are the ones who are going to be changing their behavior. And what you see when you look at this is that you see drops in gun ownership when these laws pass. You also see more people locking up their guns. People I think are less likely to own the guns, because the hysteria, the exaggerated claims of risks of having guns in the home, cause people to be afraid of having guns.
MR. WATTENBERG: In these concealed carry states, which has been a phenomenon that's taken place more or less beneath the radar of the national media, it's something that you kind of stumble on once in a while. But, this is a massive change, not many people register to carry guns. What is it, about 2 percent, when you get concealed carry?
MR. LOTT: It depends on how long the law has been in effect. When the law first gets passed you'll see about a half of a percent, three-quarters of 1 percent. But after the law has been in effect for about a decade and a half, you'll kind of get to the long-run range, in those states you'll see about four to six percent. The other thing that really matters is --
MR. WATTENBERG: And you claim a decrease in crime?
MR. LOTT: You see very clearly that the longer these laws are in effect, as the greater percentage of the population gets these permits, you see a drop in violent crime that corresponds very closely to the increased percent of the population with permits.
MS. PETERS: That makes no sense at all.
MR. WATTENBERG: Why? Wait a minute, he's making a logical case, he's saying if you have a jurisdiction where the bad guys know that the good guys might have a gun that they're not going to pull a gun, because they may get plugged. I mean, that's your argument. Now, why is that so stupid.
MR. LUDWIG: I think one thing that's important to keep in mind with these laws is that nationally about 7-1/2 percent of adults carry a gun at any point during a year. And so there's this question of --
MR. LOTT: It's hunting. That includes people just moving between residences, any reason.
MR. LUDWIG: Carrying guns in their car, not transporting them to a shooting range. So lots of people are carrying guns around in public as it is.
MR. LOTT: That could be once in a year.
MR. LUDWIG: And so there's this real question of how there laws change the deterrent threat to criminals. Now, there's not much data available on this, for the reason that Rebecca notes, the Centers For Disease Control isn't funded by Congress to gather the information we want. But, the data that are available from selected states suggests that lots of the people who go out and get concealed carry permits were carrying already before they got the permit. And survey data that we have from North Carolina and Texas also suggests that there's not much of a change in the frequency with which they're carrying their guns.
MR. WATTENBERG: So what's your problem with it?
MR. LUDWIG: I think that the -- it's really in my view an open question of what the net effects of these things are going to be, especially if the proportion of people -- if the change in gun carrying really does increase over time. I don't think right now we know what the effects are going to be. But, I think an important point about these laws that is frequently missed when we talk about them, when people think about the costs -- when you think about the benefits of these laws you think about the deterrent effect that John Lott emphasizes, when you think about the costs, attention has been focused on the gun misuse by the people who get the concealed carry permits.
I think there's another cost here that's less obvious, but also very important, and that is the fact that is raises the possibility of an arms race between the civilian population, and people who are inclined to participate in crime. So right now victimization surveys suggest that about one-quarter of all robberies, only about a quarter of robberies involve guns in the United States. Surveys of incarcerated felons suggest that about half of the people who carried guns, so half of the criminals who carried guns carried weapons because they were afraid of encountering an armed victim. I think it at least raises the possibility that if a larger share of the civilian population carries guns, you might see an increase in gun carrying among criminals.
MR. WATTENBERG: So what you are suggesting would be the personal equivalent of unilateral disarmament. The good guys go first, because they're the registrants who will register first. And you think that then the criminals will be less motivated to carry guns, rather than to say, boy, now I really have an advantage?
MR. LUDWIG: I think it raises a question -- what John is suggesting is that we should move to a higher gun carrying equilibrium, and I think it's not obvious that that's going to -- I think if you think about it in the flip, what John is suggesting is that more of the "good guys" carry guns. But, I think it's at least as plausible that there is -- one possibility is that the bad guys just drop out of the race all together. It seems at least as plausible that the bad guys scale up and arms themselves. Now, again, I don't know which of these net effects -- I think right now the state of the science doesn't tell us.
MS. PETERS: Also, whether they're motivated to carry guns or not, if the law required licensing and registration universally, then it would just be -- the physical availability of guns would be much less for criminals, because at the moment the way they get their guns is they move out of the legal sector into the criminal market.
MR. WATTENBERG: Let's just have a little quick discussion. And let's just go around the room, and we are out of time, give me a short answer, I asked in the set up piece whether these were mutually exclusive ideas, that we ought to have tougher gun control laws, and make it harder for people to get guns, harder to use them accidentally, trigger locks, all that kind of stuff, and this idea of concealed carry, which after all has now been voted on by a majority of the states in a stunning political reversal. What's wrong with saying, as I think I would say, I'm for both?
MS. PETERS: In fact, there's nothing wrong with that, in saying you're for both.
MR. WATTENBERG: But, you're not for both?
MS. PETERS: Well, I'm for the upstream measure of ensuring that the bad guys can't get guns. My area is not talking about how many good guys should have guns. My area is talking about making sure the bad guys can't.
MR. WATTENBERG: But, we have an election campaign. Texas is a right to carry story.
MR. LOTT: That's right.
MR. WATTENBERG: Is Tennessee?
MR. LOTT: Tennessee is also.
MR. WATTENBERG: So Al Gore and George Bush both come from right to carry states.
MR. LOTT: Right. Al Gore has never criticized the law in Tennessee.
MS. PETERS: Right to carry is not going to be an election issue.
MR. LOTT: Gore has mentioned it almost continuously in his speeches.
MS. PETERS: But, licensing and registration is. Licensing and registration is an issue that the candidates differ on.
MR. WATTENBERG: But, Gore has criticized concealed carry?
MR. LOTT: Quite a bit, in Texas he constantly brings it up in speeches. Last year it was about a six month period of time where every other speech he brought it up.
MR. WATTENBERG: The question is, what's wrong with my view, which is what's wrong with both?
MR. LOTT: Because you have to say, what's the benefits from licensing laws. And as we talked about before, I don't think there really are many. There's no empirical evidence --
MR. WATTENBERG: What's the harm?
MR. LOTT: The harm is it takes a lot of time by police. Hawaii, for example, is just talking about changing their registration law. They estimate that it would take 50,000 man hours each year in Hawaii to go and have new registration that's there. That's 50,000 hours that the police could have spent --
MR. WATTENBERG: You know the argument, we register cars, why can't we register guns. What is such a big deal about it?
MR. LOTT: I think most gun owners would be happy to have the same laws for guns that you have for cars. If I have a car on my property I don't have to register it. It's when I take it out and drive it around on the public streets. And I can go and get my license in Washington, D.C., and then drive all the way to California. You can't do that right now. If I get a permit to carry my gun in Virginia, I can't go to Washington, D.C.
MR. WATTENBERG: Now, you're boxing yourself into a corner of national registration. You're saying national registration, that would be fine, then you could take it across country.
MS. PETERS: Sure.
MR. LOTT: Look, all I'm saying is, most gun owners probably would be happy to have the same rules that you have for cars being applied to guns.
MR. WATTENBERG: But, the NRA would not?
MR. LOTT: Well, if you register the gun that's in the home -- if you have it like cars you wouldn't have to register the gun that's in your home. You'd only have to register the gun that you go and you take out in public.
MS. PETERS: You have to register the car when it's transferred, when the ownership is transferred.
MR. WATTENBERG: We have one last comment about my question, it comes from Jens, he wraps it up, which is what's wrong with both?
MR. LUDWIG: I think that these concealed carry laws as they currently work aren't going to have much of an effect. In large part because I don't think there's much of a change in gun carrying. And where there is a change in gun carrying statistics suggest that it's primarily middle aged, middle class white guys in rural areas. They're not where the action really is. I don't think that there's going to be much of an effect. I think things like registration of guns, and tighter gun laws may be helpful in closing down the loophole that exempts 40 percent of all gun transactions right now from the current regulatory system that's designed to keep guns from teens and criminals. I think if you put the question to me I could have both over neither, because I think the additional gun control would be helpful, I think the concealed carry laws probably wouldn't do much one way or the other. I'd take that deal.
MR. WATTENBERG: You'd take both over neither?
MR. LUDWIG: I'd take both over neither.
MR. WATTENBERG: And between both versus neither, would you take both?
MR. LOTT: I probably would move a little bit towards both. But, I don't think that --
MS. PETERS: I'd definitely take both.
MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. So we have sort of consensus. Thank you very much, Jens Ludwig, John Lott, and Rebecca Peters.
And thank you. We at Think Tank encourage feedback from our viewers via email. It's very important to us.
For Think Tank, I'm Ben Wattenberg.
ANNOUNCER: We at Think Tank depend on your views to make our show better. Please send your questions and comments to New River Media, 1219 Connecticut Avenue, Northwest, Washington, D.C. 20036, or email us at thinktank@pbs.org. To learn more about Think Tank, visit PBS Online at pbs.org. And please let us know where you watch Think Tank.
This has been a production of BJW, Incorporated, in association with New River Media, which are solely responsible for its content.
Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation.
(End of program.)
,