Gun Zealots Promote Discredited Study

by Kathryn Eastburn

Harvard School of Public Health professor David Hemenway calls this theory the Archie Bunker approach to crime. "If everyone was allowed to carry guns, them hijackers wouldn't have no superiority," the '70s television character once spouted. "All you gotta do is arm all the passengers, then no hijacker would risk pullin' a rod."

We all know that's not how airlines were made safe from the threat of hijackers. But in state after state over the past twenty years, laws have been enacted that have taken away the discretionary power of police to decide who should be allowed to carry a concealed weapon, granting, instead, the right to practically anyone of legal age who is not a convicted felon to carry a concealed handgun.

The result is an important component of what many social and media critics now refer to as "the gun culture." And a significant formative factor in that culture was a landmark economic study that has become the sounding board for right-to-carry proponents across the United States.

In 1996, five months before his study "Crime, Deterrence and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns" was published in the Journal of Legal Studies, University of Chicago economist John Lott released his study to the press, drawing rapid attention to such statements as: "If the rest of the country had adopted right-to-carry concealed handgun provisions in 1992, about 1,500 murders and 4,000 rapes would have been avoided."

Lott touted handguns as a panacea for women, "the great equalizer among the sexes," arguing that murder rates decline when either more women or more men carry concealed handguns, but the effect is especially pronounced for women. His findings went on to declare that the estimated annual gain to the society, based on reduction in crime, was at least $5.74 billion in 1992.

Anti-gun organizations like the Violence Policy Center met Lott's findings with skepticism and quick attacks on his integrity as an academic researcher. Specifically, they questioned the source of his funding, the Olin Foundation, claiming the group had ties to gun manufacturers. (The claims are largely unfounded. The Olin Foundation is a libertarian funding organization dedicated to ideas that support free market enterprise.)

As a result of the attacks, however, Lott became a poster child for pro-gun activists who labeled him a victim of the PC crowd.

But in months to follow, Lott's study came under more serious scrutiny. As many as ten academics, including Hemenway, uncovered serious enough flaws in Lott's analysis to discount his findings completely.

"Lott's study should have gone back to the drawing board," said Hemenway, "but instead the author decided to go public, wrote a book (More Guns, Less Crime) based on the study, held press conferences promoting the book and presented his results as if they were proof positive that liberal right-to-carry laws actually save lives."

Two years later, Lott's study is roundly dismissed by most serious academics addressing the same and similar issues. But the '97 study and More Crime, Less Guns have been used as the basis of support for liberalized gun laws across the country, and a rallying cry for many pro-gun activists, including vocal ones in Colorado who have weighed in since the killing spree in Littleton. "His results are wrong. The results are meaningless," said Hemenway. "You would not take he results as meaningful, based on the variables [used in the study.] The model's no good."

Hemenway, who has conducted a similar study in which he formulated models to assess whether state-level changes in the legal drinking age affected youth crime, found that certain models worked very well when studying the incidence of suicide and drowning, but not homicide.

"Homicide among youth goes in these waves," said Hemenway. "There are no good predictors of why these waves exist, so this kind of empirical model doesn't fit very well. Lott's analysis does not include variables that can explain cycles of crime -- crime waves, and what we call the 'contagion effect.'" That would include, clearly, says the researcher, violent crimes by youth like the one committed at Littleton last week.

A study that came shortly after Lott's by Hans Ludwig, a Georgetown University economist, using a different statistical approach found that the movement to right-to-carry laws has, if anything, caused homicide rates to increase. And in the same journal that published Lott's study, the Journal of Legal Studies, Carnegie-Mellon scholars Black and Negin said: "činference based on the Lott model is inappropriate, and their results cannot be used responsibly to formulate public policy."

In the Journal of Public Health, researcher Daniel W. Webster made an even stronger statement: "Advocates of liberalizing concealed gun carrying laws, including Lott, are using this study to persuade policymakers to loosen carrying restrictions in states without [right to carry] laws. Previous research suggests that more gun carrying by civilians may lead to more deaths. It is important for health professionals [and lawmakers] to understand the relative merit of studies that could influence the introduction of potentially dangerous policies."

Hemenway argues the distinctive problem in the United States is not rates of crime, but rather high rates of lethal violence, particularly among youth. And he views the proliferation of weapons in the society at large as a key factor in the availability of lethal weapons to kids.

The bottom line, he says, is a purely rational one based on basic economics theory: Make things harder to get, fewer people get them.

"It's not rocket science. We know from every other developed country that if you make it harder for teens to get guns, they won't."