Picture this revised version of a grim but familiar scenario: An unbalanced student strides into a high-school cafeteria waving his dad’s rifle. Students scream and dive for cover. A mild-mannered assistant principal pulls a .38 from under his tweed jacket, levels it at the kid, and orders him to put down the gun. The student obeys.
Or the man blows the student away.
Not fun stuff -- but better, John Lott argues, than the usual story, which concludes with a swarm of ambulances and television crews converging on yet another school.
Mr. Lott, a fellow in law and economics at the University of Chicago, has set gun-control advocates howling by arguing that the best way to reduce crime -- particularly the mass shootings that have made so many recent headlines -- is to permit more people, including school officials, to carry guns. The title of his new book tidily sums up his views: More Guns, Less Crime.
It’s not every day that a book from the University of Chicago Press gets raves from the National Rifle Association, an endorsement by Gun Week magazine, and a hearty plug from G. Gordon Liddy, the Watergate-felon-turned-radio-host whose love of firearms extends to teaching his children to march in drill formation with toy weapons on the front lawn. The N.R.A. sent 150,000 of its most loyal members a newsletter promoting the book. Responses to the Gun Week endorsement overloaded the answering machine of the book’s designated publicity person for days.
The book also caused a mini-revolt at Chicago, where salespeople initially blanched at the prospect of pitching it to bookstores. Some cited personal views about guns; others thought that the book would alienate booksellers. The book’s editor, Geoffrey Huck, made the case that it was a solid contribution to social science.
Even Mr. Lott’s fans would have to concede, however, that it is the volume’s buttressing of pro-gun arguments, not its multivariate regression analysis, that accounts for its selling through the first printing of 10,000 in less than three weeks.
The author himself has a knack for publicity. He used the Jonesboro, Ark., school shooting as a peg for an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal, in which he argued that laws banning guns from schools -- even from a locked closet in the principal’s office -- had backfired. “Instead of making schools safe for children,” he wrote, “we have made them safe for those intent on harming our children.”
The focus of More Guns, Less Crime is “shall issue” laws, an increasingly popular type of legislation that decrees that states must issue a concealed-weapon permit to anyone of legal age, and without a criminal record, who requests one. Pushed by the N.R.A. and adopted by 31 states, they replace laws that merely said authorities “may issue” permits to such people. Those laws leave the final decision about approving the requests to local officials.
Mr. Lott examined 10 states that approved shall-issue laws from 1977 to 1992 and found that violent crimes had nose-dived. In those states, he says, murders dropped by an average of 8 per cent, rapes by 5 per cent, and aggravated assaults by 7 per cent. The logic is fairly straightforward: Criminals don’t want to get shot. When the likelihood is that a potential victim, or a bystander, might be packing heat, they will decline that risk.
Criminals actually turn away from murder and armed robbery, and to less-confrontational crimes, such as burglary, when legislatures pass shall-issue laws, according to Mr. Lott’s data.
In an ironic, P.C. twist to his findings, he adds, the greatest beneficiaries of less-stringent laws regulating concealed weapons are not the hunting enthusiasts and white male suburbanites who form the backbone of the N.R.A., but rather women and black city dwellers.
Moreover, according to More Guns, Less Crime, those states with shall-issue laws have virtually eliminated multiple-victim shooting sprees. The assailants in those cases may be psychopaths, but even psychopaths, Mr. Lott argues, are usually rational enough to be swayed by the odds that at least one of the people in a train, an office, a public park -- or even a school -- might be prepared to whip out a gun. “Criminals tend to attack victims they perceive as relatively weak,” he says.
In the face of his startling and comprehensive study, gun-control advocates haven’t exactly folded up their tents. Nor are many other researchers convinced. The book draws upon and extends an essay that Mr. Lott published in The Journal of Legal Studies in 1997, which inspired an uproar of its own and led several social scientists to re-examine Mr. Lott’s data. Most rejected his findings. He responds to his critics in the book, but none of those who have read it think he has done so adequately.
The criticisms range from common-sense observations to arcane points about statistical methodology. It is manifestly implausible that the tiny change in pistol-wielding spurred by the shall-issue laws could lead to the sea change in criminal behavior that Mr. Lott describes, the critics argue. Even in states with the most-liberal laws, they point out, only 1 to 2 per cent of people choose to get the necessary permit to carry a weapon, and they tend to be people who already own guns. And statistics show that gun owners tend to be white males in suburban or rural environments -- hardly the people at highest risk for homicide or robbery.
“It would be nothing short of a miracle if issuing permits to middle-class white men reduced murder rates drastically,” says Philip Cook, a professor of public policy at Duke University. “If you look at the demographics of who is getting the permits, that’s who it is.”
What’s more, because some people carry weapons even when it is illegal to do so, a limited deterrent already exists, the critics say. Frank Zimring, a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley, says the huge drop in crime that Mr. Lott attributes to one piece of legislation would, if true, amount to “a miracle of the loaves and the fishes.”
To back up those first impressions, however, social scientists have had to dive into the data themselves. And there, they say, Mr. Lott has a polemic advantage over them. “There isn’t any way to boil down the criticism into a simple message, and that’s a big problem,” says Jon Vernick, associate director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at the Johns Hopkins University. “Lott is able to say, ‘My study shows that this law is responsible for X fewer murders every year, and if every state passed this kind of law, X lives would be saved each year.’ That’s a media-ready thing to say. For the most part, the criticisms get at complex methodological stuff.”
Some of the statistical problems derive from the problem of comparing crime rates in small counties, many of which would be expected to have no reported murders or assaults. Those zeros cause some sneaky, non-media-ready problems in Mr. Lott’s data set, Mr. Vernick and others say.
To get around that problem, Dan Black and Dan Nagin, of Carnegie Mellon University, re-examined Mr. Lott’s numbers but looked only at counties with populations of 100,000 or more. They found that the conclusions varied wildly from state to state: Murders climbed 105 per cent in West Virginia after a shall-issue law took effect, while in Maine aggravated assaults dropped 67 per cent. When they took Florida out of the data set, the positive effects of the law vanished -- a clear sign the findings aren’t “robust,” as statisticians say.
Mr. Lott’s study, however, has stood apart from others not just for its findings, but for its reception, which has been simultaneously icy and furious. One chapter of his book recounts his experiences with anti-gun lobbyists and other academics. The editors of the National Review found his treatment sufficiently outrageous that they plan to publish the chapter as an article -- an object lesson, they say, in the gauntlet that conservative intellectuals must run when they challenge liberal articles of faith.
When Mr. Lott conducted his study, he says, two dozen academics refused his entreaties for comments on the work. A staff member of the anti-gun group Violence Policy Center, he adds, refused to read it -- but then proceeded to attack it when reporters called. The same group denounced him as a “shill” for the gun lobby and suggested that his research was tainted because he holds the John M. Olin visiting professorship at Chicago. The Olin family made its fortune, in part, manufacturing firearms and ammunition. Both the university and the foundation have made it clear that the Olin Foundation is no more beholden to gunmakers than the Ford Foundation is to carmakers. Mr. Lott has threatened the Violence Policy Center with a lawsuit. Citing that threat, the group declined to comment.
The “shill” charge, made often on radio and television shows, led to a stream of threats and insults on Mr. Lott’s answering machine. “I’m bothered at the time of the attack, but it’s afterwards that it hits home,” he says. “I can get anywhere from a few to a hundred phone calls with people yelling and screaming, ‘How can you do this? Have you no shame?’” Mr. Lott suspects that he has paid a professional price, too, for his contrariness. He has yet to land a tenure-track job, even though he has two more books under contract with Chicago -- one on complex theories of economic “predation,” and the other on an economic theory of reputations.
Demurring at any premature canonization of Mr. Lott as a martyr, his critics point out that some of his previous work is a bit idiosyncratic. In one paper, he defends the ability of wealthy people to “buy justice,” using a line of argument that sounds like a parody of the contrarian-by-nature law-and-economics approach long associated with the University of Chicago. Since the wealthy have more to lose by being imprisoned -- in terms of lost salary and investment opportunities -- it follows that they should get shorter sentences than the poor, and escape conviction more often, he argues. He applies this even to the death penalty: The “opportunity cost” of dying is greater for the rich than for the poor, and so death is a greater penalty for the rich. Well-heeled lawyers simply help to rectify the unfairness.
Aside from the noise surrounding Mr. Lott and his new study, gun-policy researchers say the scientific process is working more or less as it should. He has presented a striking thesis, and other researchers are sorting through the data to see if it is justified. Knowledge about the subject -- in shorter supply than the polemics suggest -- may be advanced.
“It’s too bad, in a way, that the spotlight is glaring so brightly on the whole process, magnifying the intermediate steps on the way to a final resolution,” says Duke’s Mr. Cook.
Mr. Lott considers the issue resolved. Convinced by his own research, he picked up a .38-caliber pistol. Chicago’s gun-control laws, however, prevent him from carrying it, so he keeps it locked up -- in another state.