Covert Mission
New member
For those of you who admire or have heard of Prof. John Lott's work researching concealed carry laws (his book is "More Guns, Less Crime"), there is a website devoted to presenting both sides of the argument (the owner of the site is pro-Lott). It is:
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/Lott_v_Teret/Lott_Mustard_Controversy.html
In studying it, i found a link to a Handgun Control page, which attempts to refute Lott's research http://www.handguncontrol.org/lott.htm . After reading it, and recognizing much of HCI's info as lies, misrepresentations, and omissions of fact, I e-mailed Lott in outrage, encouraging him to rebut HCI, and post it on the website. He e-mailed me his point-by-point response to HCI, demolishing their argument (my God, do they lie). Here is his response. Long, but worthwhile. The items in italic are passages from HCI and others. Lott's comments are in bold.
"[A]ccording to the CPHV (Center to Prevent Handgun Violence) analysis, violent crime actually rose in 12 of 29
states (41%) which liberalized their CCW laws over the five years beginning
in 1992, compared to a similar rise in violent crime in only 4 of 22 states
(18%) which did not change their CCW laws. The disparity in the decline is
even more obvious for rates of gun violence. From 1992 to 1997 (the last
five years for which data exists), the violent crime rate in the strict and
no-issue states fell 24.8% while the violent crime rate for states with
liberal CCW laws dropped 11.4%. Nationally the violent crime rate fell
19.4%."
My response -- Handgun Control's (the parent organization of the Center to
Prevent Handgun Violence) "press release" took the change in violent crime
rates between two years, 1992 and 1997, but then classified states on the
basis of what their laws were in 1997. Some states did not even enact
their right-to-carry laws until late 1996, and a third were adopted in late
1995 on. It doesn't make much sense to me to attribute the increase in
crime for the five years before the law goes into effect to the law.
Ideally what one would want to do is look at the relative rates of change
before and after the laws were adopted in different states. This is what I
do in my research.
HCI's points attacking me:
1) John Lott claims that changing the law to allow more people to carry
concealed handguns causes a fall in violent crime, yet he finds virtually
no beneficial effect from changes in handgun carry laws on robbery - the
crime most likely to occur between strangers, and in public spaces. Is
this finding consistent with his theory -- does it make sense? --
See my book on p. 133
2) To this day, John Lott has failed to provide any statistical evidence of
his own that counters Black and Nagin's finding that Lott's conclusions are
inappropriately attributed to changes in concealed carry laws. Until Lott
can do this, it is inappropriate for him to continue to claim that allowing
more people to carry concealed handguns causes a drop in violent crime. --
Other related complaints:
"While he includes a chapter that contains replies to his critics,
unfortunately he doesn't directly respond to the key Black and Nagin
finding that formal statistical tests reject his methods. The closest he
gets to addressing this point is to acknowledge 'the more serious
possibility that some other factor may have caused both the reduction in
crime rates and the passage of the law to occur at the same time, but then
goes on to say that he has 'presented over a thousand [statistical model]
specifications' that reveal 'an extremely consistent pattern" that
right-to-carry laws reduce crime. Another view would be that a thousand
versions of a demonstrably invalid analytical approach produce boxes full
of invalid results." Jens Ludwig, "Guns and Numbers," Washington Monthly
(June 1998) p. 51
"we applied a number of specification tests suggested by James J. Heckman
and V. Joseph Hotz. The results are available from us on request. The
specifics of the findings, however, are less important than the overall
conclusion that is implied. The results show that commonly the model
either overestimates or underestimates the crime rate of adopting states in
the years prior to adoption." Black and Nagin, "Do right-to-Carry Laws
Deter Violent Crime," Journal of Legal Studies, January 1998, p. 218.
My response:
The brief couple of sentences that Black and Nagin spent on this issue in
their paper never really struck me as either a "key" issue or as a
particularly serious one, though I did include a response to this general
point in the original book. Their test is based upon the claim that I am
assuming an immediate as well as constant effect from the adoption of
right-to-carry laws. True, when one looks at the simple before and after
average crime rates, as done in Table 4.1 and a corresponding table in my
original work with Mustard, this is the assumption that is being made.
But I then emphasized that was not a very realistic way to test the impact
of the right-to-carry laws, and I continued with more complicated
specifications. Black and Nagin's test confirms the very criticisms that I
was making of these initial simplifying assumptions.
Looking at the before-and-after averages merely provides a overly
simplified starting point. If criminals respond to the risk of meeting a
potential victim who is carrying a concealed handgun, the deterrent effect
of a concealed handgun laws should be related to the number of concealed
handguns being carried and that should rise gradually over time. It was
precisely because of these concerns that I included a variable for the
number of years after the law had been in effect. As consistently
demonstrated in Figure 1 in my original paper and the figures in this book
(e.g., pages 77-79), these estimated time trends confirmed that crime rates
were rising before the law went into effect and falling afterward, with the
effect increasing as more years went by.
As discussed already in the book, nor did I did not expect the impact to be
the same across all states, because not all places started issuing permits
at the same rate (see response to point #3 on page 131-132). Indeed, this
is one of the reasons why I tried to examine whether the drops in crime
rates were greatest in urban, high population areas.
3) Researchers who have reanalyzed Lott's data, for example, found no
beneficial impact from changes in carry laws when Florida was not included
in the study, or when they restricted their analysis to counties that had
populations greater than 100,000 people. --
This is not true. See my book on 138-140.
4) Doesn't Lott implicitly acknowledge that his work is fundamentally
flawed because he does not account for other factors which could affect
both the crime rate and the decision by state legislators to change carry
laws? -- see the discussion on page 153 that they cite.
5) Kleck has accepted the Black and Nagin critique, writing in his new book
that Lott's thesis "could be challenged, in light of how modest the
intervention was. [More] likely, the declines in crime, coinciding with
relaxation of carry laws were largely attributable to other factors not
controlled for in the Lott and Mustard analysis" (Targeting Guns; p. 372).
-- read Kleck's blurb on the dust jacket of my book. He makes a similar
point in the part that they fail to quote in the book. I have asked Kleck
and he can't think of what I may have left out.
6) Does anyone really believe that auto theft is a substitute for rape or
for murder?
See my book on p. 134
7) John Lott's claim is "more guns, less crime," but a substantial portion
of that claim is based on his use of two voter exit polls. Can he use
these polls to make this claim? And, does the evidence support the claim?
--
Everything the mention is already addressed at the beginning of Chapter 3.
8) Is it true that law enforcement has consistently been opposed to
weakening carry concealed weapons laws? --
See the information on pages 13 and 14.
9) Wouldn't allowing more people to carry concealed handguns increase
incidents of citizens attacking each other? -- andother related comments:
"But Susan Glick, a researcher for the Violence Policy Center in
Washington, a research group that focuses on gun laws found that many
people issued concealed-weapons permits in Texas, a state with
comparatively loose gun laws, had run afoul of the law. Some 15 people in
Texas out of perhaps 200,000 who were issued permits to carry concealed
weapons since 1996 have been charged with murder or attempted murder, Ms.
Glick said." Dirk Johnson, "Divided Missouri to Vote on a Right to Carry
Concealed Guns," New York Times, April 2, 1999, p. A16.
"In states with lax CCW laws, hundreds of licensees have committed crimes
both before and after their licensure. For example, in Texas, which
weakened its CCW law in 1996, the Department of Public Safety reported that
felony and misdemeanor cases involving CCW permit holders rose 54.4%
between 1996 and 1997." Douglas Weil, "Carrying Concealed Guns is Not the
Solution," Intellectualcapital.com, March 26, 1998.
In response to my statement that "The kinds of people who go through the
criminal background check and undergo the training aren't the kinds of
people who commit the crimes." "Antigun activists complain that no reliable
data exists linking concealed weapons to crime because the gun lobby has
been successful in hiding it." James N. Thurman, "As more carry hidden
guns, who's safer?" Christian Science Monitor, September 1, 1999, p. 1.
My response:
The type of people who obtain permits tend to be extremely law abiding.
That holds true for Texas as well as other states. Texas issued over
192,000 permits during the first three years of its right-to-carry law from
January 1, 1996 to December 31, 1998. Arrests for crimes involving a gun
are a particularly misleading statistic because someone who uses their gun
defensively is still likely to be arrested unless the police officer was
completely sure that the person behaved properly. By March 1999 an
Associated Press report was able to state that: "only 515 of the charges .
. . resulted in convictions, though some were still pending. . . . the
bulk of the convictions against licensed concealed-handgun holders were
misdemeanors, including 185 for drunken driving and 21 for prostitution.
Felonies included 31 convictions for aggravated assault, six for assault
causing bodily injury and five for aggravated sexual assault. No licensed
handgun holder in Texas has been convicted of murder . . ." Tela Goodwin
Mange, a Texas Department of Public Safety spokeswoman, noted that "The
fact there are so few incidents relative to the number of people who have
concealed handguns is a positive thing."
Doug Weil is correct that Texas experienced a 54 percent increase in
arrests between 1996 and 1997, but what he fails to mention is that the
number of permits increased by 50 percent between those two years. Weil's
statement also makes it appear that Texas' law changed between the two
years, but Texas' law actaully went into effect January 1, 1996.
Yet, the experience in Texas is probably best summarized by Glenn White,
president of the Dallas Police Association: "I lobbied against the law . .
. because I thought it would lead to wholesale armed conflict. That hasn't
happened. All the horror stories . . . didn't happen. No bogeyman. I think
it has worked out well . . . I am a convert."
As I document in my book, the experience has been similar in other states.
The vast majority of revocations involve misdemeanors and even when gun
related violations occurred, the vast majority of those involve cases like
carrying a gun into a restricted area like an airport. There is no
evidence that any of these violations involving taking a gun into a
restricted area amounted to anything more than an accident and that the
permit holder had simply forgot that he had the gun with him.
-- Arizona: .1 percent of the permits issued between the end of the Fall of 1994 and July 31st 1999, though up to half of these were revocations for administrative reasons such as the person dying or saying that they no longer required the permit.
-- Alaska: .3 percent of the permits issued from January 1, 1995 to August 17, 1999 were revoked for any reason. None involved the firing of the gun.
-- Florida: .2 percent of the permits issued during October 1, 1987 to February 28, 1999 were revoked for any reason. 113, or .02 percent, were revoked for any type of firearms related violations, and these were
virtually all nonthreatening.
-- Indiana: .16 percent of the active permit holders had their permits revoked or suspended for any reason during 1998.
-- North Carolina: .3 percent of the permits issued between December 1, 1995 and August 4, 1999 were revoked for any reason. While detailed records are not kept of the reasons for revocal, those who oversaw the collection of the statistics could not recall hearing of any cases where a permit holder had improperly fired a gun.
-- Oklahoma: .1 percent of the permits issued from 1996 to August 1999 were revoked for any reason. Yet even these numbers exaggerate the risks posed by permit holders. For example, at least some of these permit holders had there licenses "revoked" simply because they died. The Oklahoma Supreme
Court also recently ruled that the state had improperly revoked some permits for reasons unrelated to one's fitness to carry a concealed handgun.
-- South Carolina: .4 percent of the permits issued from July 1996 to August 16, 1999 were revoked for any reason. No violations involving the firing of a gun by a permit holder. One person carrying a gun without a
shirt lost his permit for not keeping his gun hidden.
-- Utah: .4 percent of the permits issued between the summer of 1994 and July 1999 were revoke for any reason. 80 percent of revocations results from DUI's. No violations involving the firing of a gun by a permit holder
in Utah.
-- Wyoming: .2 percent of the permits issued during 1994 to 1999 were revoked for any reason. James M. Wilson, the supervisor for the permitting program, stated that "Revocations did not include any cased of discharging of a firearm."
--John Lott
[This message has been edited by Covert Mission (edited September 30, 1999).]
[This message has been edited by Covert Mission (edited September 30, 1999).]
[This message has been edited by Covert Mission (edited September 30, 1999).]
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/Lott_v_Teret/Lott_Mustard_Controversy.html
In studying it, i found a link to a Handgun Control page, which attempts to refute Lott's research http://www.handguncontrol.org/lott.htm . After reading it, and recognizing much of HCI's info as lies, misrepresentations, and omissions of fact, I e-mailed Lott in outrage, encouraging him to rebut HCI, and post it on the website. He e-mailed me his point-by-point response to HCI, demolishing their argument (my God, do they lie). Here is his response. Long, but worthwhile. The items in italic are passages from HCI and others. Lott's comments are in bold.
"[A]ccording to the CPHV (Center to Prevent Handgun Violence) analysis, violent crime actually rose in 12 of 29
states (41%) which liberalized their CCW laws over the five years beginning
in 1992, compared to a similar rise in violent crime in only 4 of 22 states
(18%) which did not change their CCW laws. The disparity in the decline is
even more obvious for rates of gun violence. From 1992 to 1997 (the last
five years for which data exists), the violent crime rate in the strict and
no-issue states fell 24.8% while the violent crime rate for states with
liberal CCW laws dropped 11.4%. Nationally the violent crime rate fell
19.4%."
My response -- Handgun Control's (the parent organization of the Center to
Prevent Handgun Violence) "press release" took the change in violent crime
rates between two years, 1992 and 1997, but then classified states on the
basis of what their laws were in 1997. Some states did not even enact
their right-to-carry laws until late 1996, and a third were adopted in late
1995 on. It doesn't make much sense to me to attribute the increase in
crime for the five years before the law goes into effect to the law.
Ideally what one would want to do is look at the relative rates of change
before and after the laws were adopted in different states. This is what I
do in my research.
HCI's points attacking me:
1) John Lott claims that changing the law to allow more people to carry
concealed handguns causes a fall in violent crime, yet he finds virtually
no beneficial effect from changes in handgun carry laws on robbery - the
crime most likely to occur between strangers, and in public spaces. Is
this finding consistent with his theory -- does it make sense? --
See my book on p. 133
2) To this day, John Lott has failed to provide any statistical evidence of
his own that counters Black and Nagin's finding that Lott's conclusions are
inappropriately attributed to changes in concealed carry laws. Until Lott
can do this, it is inappropriate for him to continue to claim that allowing
more people to carry concealed handguns causes a drop in violent crime. --
Other related complaints:
"While he includes a chapter that contains replies to his critics,
unfortunately he doesn't directly respond to the key Black and Nagin
finding that formal statistical tests reject his methods. The closest he
gets to addressing this point is to acknowledge 'the more serious
possibility that some other factor may have caused both the reduction in
crime rates and the passage of the law to occur at the same time, but then
goes on to say that he has 'presented over a thousand [statistical model]
specifications' that reveal 'an extremely consistent pattern" that
right-to-carry laws reduce crime. Another view would be that a thousand
versions of a demonstrably invalid analytical approach produce boxes full
of invalid results." Jens Ludwig, "Guns and Numbers," Washington Monthly
(June 1998) p. 51
"we applied a number of specification tests suggested by James J. Heckman
and V. Joseph Hotz. The results are available from us on request. The
specifics of the findings, however, are less important than the overall
conclusion that is implied. The results show that commonly the model
either overestimates or underestimates the crime rate of adopting states in
the years prior to adoption." Black and Nagin, "Do right-to-Carry Laws
Deter Violent Crime," Journal of Legal Studies, January 1998, p. 218.
My response:
The brief couple of sentences that Black and Nagin spent on this issue in
their paper never really struck me as either a "key" issue or as a
particularly serious one, though I did include a response to this general
point in the original book. Their test is based upon the claim that I am
assuming an immediate as well as constant effect from the adoption of
right-to-carry laws. True, when one looks at the simple before and after
average crime rates, as done in Table 4.1 and a corresponding table in my
original work with Mustard, this is the assumption that is being made.
But I then emphasized that was not a very realistic way to test the impact
of the right-to-carry laws, and I continued with more complicated
specifications. Black and Nagin's test confirms the very criticisms that I
was making of these initial simplifying assumptions.
Looking at the before-and-after averages merely provides a overly
simplified starting point. If criminals respond to the risk of meeting a
potential victim who is carrying a concealed handgun, the deterrent effect
of a concealed handgun laws should be related to the number of concealed
handguns being carried and that should rise gradually over time. It was
precisely because of these concerns that I included a variable for the
number of years after the law had been in effect. As consistently
demonstrated in Figure 1 in my original paper and the figures in this book
(e.g., pages 77-79), these estimated time trends confirmed that crime rates
were rising before the law went into effect and falling afterward, with the
effect increasing as more years went by.
As discussed already in the book, nor did I did not expect the impact to be
the same across all states, because not all places started issuing permits
at the same rate (see response to point #3 on page 131-132). Indeed, this
is one of the reasons why I tried to examine whether the drops in crime
rates were greatest in urban, high population areas.
3) Researchers who have reanalyzed Lott's data, for example, found no
beneficial impact from changes in carry laws when Florida was not included
in the study, or when they restricted their analysis to counties that had
populations greater than 100,000 people. --
This is not true. See my book on 138-140.
4) Doesn't Lott implicitly acknowledge that his work is fundamentally
flawed because he does not account for other factors which could affect
both the crime rate and the decision by state legislators to change carry
laws? -- see the discussion on page 153 that they cite.
5) Kleck has accepted the Black and Nagin critique, writing in his new book
that Lott's thesis "could be challenged, in light of how modest the
intervention was. [More] likely, the declines in crime, coinciding with
relaxation of carry laws were largely attributable to other factors not
controlled for in the Lott and Mustard analysis" (Targeting Guns; p. 372).
-- read Kleck's blurb on the dust jacket of my book. He makes a similar
point in the part that they fail to quote in the book. I have asked Kleck
and he can't think of what I may have left out.
6) Does anyone really believe that auto theft is a substitute for rape or
for murder?
See my book on p. 134
7) John Lott's claim is "more guns, less crime," but a substantial portion
of that claim is based on his use of two voter exit polls. Can he use
these polls to make this claim? And, does the evidence support the claim?
--
Everything the mention is already addressed at the beginning of Chapter 3.
8) Is it true that law enforcement has consistently been opposed to
weakening carry concealed weapons laws? --
See the information on pages 13 and 14.
9) Wouldn't allowing more people to carry concealed handguns increase
incidents of citizens attacking each other? -- andother related comments:
"But Susan Glick, a researcher for the Violence Policy Center in
Washington, a research group that focuses on gun laws found that many
people issued concealed-weapons permits in Texas, a state with
comparatively loose gun laws, had run afoul of the law. Some 15 people in
Texas out of perhaps 200,000 who were issued permits to carry concealed
weapons since 1996 have been charged with murder or attempted murder, Ms.
Glick said." Dirk Johnson, "Divided Missouri to Vote on a Right to Carry
Concealed Guns," New York Times, April 2, 1999, p. A16.
"In states with lax CCW laws, hundreds of licensees have committed crimes
both before and after their licensure. For example, in Texas, which
weakened its CCW law in 1996, the Department of Public Safety reported that
felony and misdemeanor cases involving CCW permit holders rose 54.4%
between 1996 and 1997." Douglas Weil, "Carrying Concealed Guns is Not the
Solution," Intellectualcapital.com, March 26, 1998.
In response to my statement that "The kinds of people who go through the
criminal background check and undergo the training aren't the kinds of
people who commit the crimes." "Antigun activists complain that no reliable
data exists linking concealed weapons to crime because the gun lobby has
been successful in hiding it." James N. Thurman, "As more carry hidden
guns, who's safer?" Christian Science Monitor, September 1, 1999, p. 1.
My response:
The type of people who obtain permits tend to be extremely law abiding.
That holds true for Texas as well as other states. Texas issued over
192,000 permits during the first three years of its right-to-carry law from
January 1, 1996 to December 31, 1998. Arrests for crimes involving a gun
are a particularly misleading statistic because someone who uses their gun
defensively is still likely to be arrested unless the police officer was
completely sure that the person behaved properly. By March 1999 an
Associated Press report was able to state that: "only 515 of the charges .
. . resulted in convictions, though some were still pending. . . . the
bulk of the convictions against licensed concealed-handgun holders were
misdemeanors, including 185 for drunken driving and 21 for prostitution.
Felonies included 31 convictions for aggravated assault, six for assault
causing bodily injury and five for aggravated sexual assault. No licensed
handgun holder in Texas has been convicted of murder . . ." Tela Goodwin
Mange, a Texas Department of Public Safety spokeswoman, noted that "The
fact there are so few incidents relative to the number of people who have
concealed handguns is a positive thing."
Doug Weil is correct that Texas experienced a 54 percent increase in
arrests between 1996 and 1997, but what he fails to mention is that the
number of permits increased by 50 percent between those two years. Weil's
statement also makes it appear that Texas' law changed between the two
years, but Texas' law actaully went into effect January 1, 1996.
Yet, the experience in Texas is probably best summarized by Glenn White,
president of the Dallas Police Association: "I lobbied against the law . .
. because I thought it would lead to wholesale armed conflict. That hasn't
happened. All the horror stories . . . didn't happen. No bogeyman. I think
it has worked out well . . . I am a convert."
As I document in my book, the experience has been similar in other states.
The vast majority of revocations involve misdemeanors and even when gun
related violations occurred, the vast majority of those involve cases like
carrying a gun into a restricted area like an airport. There is no
evidence that any of these violations involving taking a gun into a
restricted area amounted to anything more than an accident and that the
permit holder had simply forgot that he had the gun with him.
-- Arizona: .1 percent of the permits issued between the end of the Fall of 1994 and July 31st 1999, though up to half of these were revocations for administrative reasons such as the person dying or saying that they no longer required the permit.
-- Alaska: .3 percent of the permits issued from January 1, 1995 to August 17, 1999 were revoked for any reason. None involved the firing of the gun.
-- Florida: .2 percent of the permits issued during October 1, 1987 to February 28, 1999 were revoked for any reason. 113, or .02 percent, were revoked for any type of firearms related violations, and these were
virtually all nonthreatening.
-- Indiana: .16 percent of the active permit holders had their permits revoked or suspended for any reason during 1998.
-- North Carolina: .3 percent of the permits issued between December 1, 1995 and August 4, 1999 were revoked for any reason. While detailed records are not kept of the reasons for revocal, those who oversaw the collection of the statistics could not recall hearing of any cases where a permit holder had improperly fired a gun.
-- Oklahoma: .1 percent of the permits issued from 1996 to August 1999 were revoked for any reason. Yet even these numbers exaggerate the risks posed by permit holders. For example, at least some of these permit holders had there licenses "revoked" simply because they died. The Oklahoma Supreme
Court also recently ruled that the state had improperly revoked some permits for reasons unrelated to one's fitness to carry a concealed handgun.
-- South Carolina: .4 percent of the permits issued from July 1996 to August 16, 1999 were revoked for any reason. No violations involving the firing of a gun by a permit holder. One person carrying a gun without a
shirt lost his permit for not keeping his gun hidden.
-- Utah: .4 percent of the permits issued between the summer of 1994 and July 1999 were revoke for any reason. 80 percent of revocations results from DUI's. No violations involving the firing of a gun by a permit holder
in Utah.
-- Wyoming: .2 percent of the permits issued during 1994 to 1999 were revoked for any reason. James M. Wilson, the supervisor for the permitting program, stated that "Revocations did not include any cased of discharging of a firearm."
--John Lott
[This message has been edited by Covert Mission (edited September 30, 1999).]
[This message has been edited by Covert Mission (edited September 30, 1999).]
[This message has been edited by Covert Mission (edited September 30, 1999).]