Our violence problem includes guns but runs deeper too

 

 

John Lott, the economist who wrote "More Guns, Less Crime," has been an intellectual leader for the less gun regulation camp for many years.  A 2003 Mother Jones article provides a review that includes:

 

"...Still, economists like Stanford's John Donohue and Georgetown's Jens Ludwig say that when first published in 1997, Lott's work was novel and even cutting edge. But the intervening years -- and increased scholarly scrutiny -- have not been kind to the "More Guns, Less Crime" idea. In fact, social scientists have turned away from the thesis even as Lott has stuck by his original conclusions. As a result, to maintain his argument Lott has had to go to considerable lengths, as demonstrated by a recent brouhaha over a massive critique of his work in the Stanford Law Review.

 

The Stanford Law Review critique, authored by Yale's Ayres and Stanford's Donohue, analyzed more recent crime statistics, extending Lott's original 1977-1992 crime dataset to include data through the late 1990s. As it turned out, after 1992, partly due to the end of the 1980s' crack cocaine-related crime wave, crime rates dropped dramatically in states with large urban centers, many of which had not passed right to carry laws.

This fact proves highly inconvenient to the "More Guns, Less Crime" argument. After testing Lott and Mustard's analysis with more years of data and different econometric tweakings, Donohue and Ayres conclude, "No longer can any plausible case be made on statistical grounds that shall-issue laws are likely to reduce crime for all or even most states"; their analysis even suggested such laws might increase violent crime."

And just the other day Lott was interviewed by Soledad O'Brien.  Of course, the argument Lott has been making for years is only one part of the larger debate, but since it keeps coming up....