There are more than 200 million Ž rearms in private hands in the United
States—more than the number of adults (Cook and Ludwig, 1996). Almost two thirds of homicides in the United States involve a Ž rearm, a fraction far greater than other industrialized countries. Combining those two facts, one might conjecture that easy access to guns in the U.S. may be part of the explanation for our unusually high homicide rates. Indeed, the most careful study on the subjectŽ finds that higher rates of handgun ownership, which represent about one-third of all firearms, may be a causal factor in violent crime rates (Duggan, 2001).
There is, however, little or no evidence that changes in gun control laws in the 1990s can account for falling crime.
The Brady bill
For example, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993 instituted stricter requirements for background checks before a gun is sold. However, Ludwig and Cook (2000) report no difference in homicide trends after the passage of the Brady Act in states affected by the law and states that already had policies in place that were at least as stringent as those in the
Brady Act. Given the realities of an active black market in guns (Cook, Molliconi and Cole, 1995), the apparent ineffectiveness of gun control laws should not come as a great surprise to economists. Even in the late 1980s, prior to the Brady Act, only about one-Ž fifth of prisoners reported obtaining their guns through licensed gun dealers (Wright and Rossi, 1994).
Gun buy-back programs are another form of public policy instituted in the
1990s that is largely ineffective in reducing crime. First, the guns that are typically surrendered in gun buy-backs are those guns that are least likely to be used in criminal activities. The guns turned in will be, by deŽfinition, those for which the owners derive little value from the possession of the guns. In contrast, those who are using guns in crimes are unlikely to participate in such programs. Second, because replacement guns are relatively easily obtained, the decline in the number of guns on the streetmay be smaller than the number of guns that are turned in. Third, the likelihood that any particular gun will be used in a crime in a given year is low. In 1999, approximately 6,500 homicides were committed with handguns.
There are approximately 65 million handguns in the United States. Thus, if a different handgun were used in each homicide, the likelihood that a particular handgun would be used to kill an individual in a particular year is one in 10,000. The typical gun buy-back program yields fewer than 1,000 guns. Thus, it is not surprising that research evaluations have consistently failed to document any link between gun buy-back programs and reductions in gun violence (Callahan, Rivera and Koepsell,
1994; Kennedy, Piehl and Braga, 1996; Rosenfeld, 1996; Reuter and Mouzos, 2003).
More stringent gun-control policies such as bans on handgun acquisition
passed in Washington, D.C., in 1976 and the ban on handgun ownership in
Chicago in 1982 do not seem to have reduced crime, either. While initial research suggested a benefiŽcial impact of the D.C. gun ban (Loftin, McDowall, Weirsema and Cottey, 1991), when the city of Baltimore is used as a control group, rather than the affluent Washington suburbs, the apparent beneŽfits of the gun ban disappear (Britt, Kleck and Bordua, 1996).
Although no careful analysis of Chicago’s gun ban
has been carried out, the fact that Chicago has been a laggard in the nationwide homicide decline argues against any large impact of the law. From a theoretical perspective, policies that raise the costs of using guns in the commission of actual crimes, as opposed to targeting ownership, would appear to be a more effective approach to reducing gun crime (for instance, Kessler and Levitt, 1999). The most prominent of these programs, Project Exile, which provides prison sentence enhancements for gun offenders, however, has been convincingly demonstrated to be ineffective by Raphael and Ludwig (2003), apparently in part because of the small scale on which it was carried out.
174 Journal of Economic Perspectives
5) Laws Allowing the Carrying of Concealed Weapons
The highly publicized work of Lott and Mustard (1997) claimed enormous
reductions in violent crime due to concealed weapons laws. The theory behind this claim is straightforward: armed victims raise the costs faced by a potential offender.
The empirical work in support of this hypothesis, however, has proven to be
fragile along a number of dimensions (Black and Nagin, 1998; Ludwig, 1998;
Duggan, 2001; Ayres and Donohue, 2003). First, allowing concealed weapons
should have the greatest impact on crimes that involve face-to-face contact and occur outside the home where the law might affect gun carrying. Robbery is the crime category that most clearly Žfits this description, yet Ayres and Donohue (2003) demonstrate that empirically the passage of these laws is, if anything, positively related to the robbery rate. More generally, Duggan (2001) Ž finds that for crimes that appear to decline with the law change, the declines in crime actually predate the passage of the laws, arguing against a causal impact of the law. Finally, when the original Lott and Mustard (1997) data set is extended forward in time to encompass
a large number of additional law enactments, the results disappear (Ayres and
Donohue, 2003). Ultimately, there appears to be little basis for believing that
concealed weapons laws have had an appreciable impact on crime.
