‘Where More Households Have Guns, the Overall Homicide Rate Goes Up’

Killings involving guns always attract public interest, but they rarely lead to policy overhauls. That’s why Jens Ludwig, a professor of law and public policy at the University of Chicago, doesn’t expect the recent shootings in Tucson to move politicians into action. Mr. Ludwig is a gun-policy researcher and an editor, along with Philip J. Cook, of Duke University, and Justin McCrary, of the University of California at Berkeley, of Controlling Crime: Strategies and Tradeoffs, forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. He also directs the University of Chicago Crime Lab.

Q. Does research show that owning guns increases the rate of death by guns?

A. My friend Phil Cook at Duke and I have done a study that got published in the Journal of Public Economics. We find that in areas where more households have guns, the overall homicide rate goes up. What we are inferring from that is that the costs from increased gun thefts and unregulated gun sales outweigh whatever benefits there are from owning a gun to use against criminals.

Q. Would making it harder to own guns reduce the rate of violent crimes by guns?

A. In the early 80s, the city of Chicago implemented a handgun ban, and there really was not much change in household gun-ownership rates. The reason for that is it’s really hard to enforce a ban. The Chicago Police Department never did house-to-house searches all over Chicago. The other problem is that Mississippi still had extraordinarily easy state gun laws. It’s going to be really hard for cities and states to regulate their own way out of the gun-violence problem in a world in which you don’t get stopped at a city or state border and your car doesn’t get searched for whether you’ve got a gun in it.

Q. Incidents like the shooting in January that killed six and left Rep. Gabrielle Giffords severely wounded generate a lot of media attention. Do these high-profile shootings affect researchers’ ability to attract money for gun-control research?

A. Nobody funds gun research. Nobody. There have been countless tragedies over the last 15 years, and the number of foundations that are interested in this problem has stayed constant at precisely one—the Joyce Foundation.

Q. You’ve pointed out that the stringency of gun laws varies by state. Should we expect talk of federal gun-control reform any time soon?

A. I would be very surprised if we saw a big change in federal gun laws in the U.S. in my lifetime. The National Rifle Association is extremely good at what it does. When you ask the public whether they support a given enhancement to current gun laws, majorities on the order of 60 to 90 percent say yes to almost everything except an outright gun ban. But the support of most of those people is pretty shallow. They certainly don’t care enough to go get mobilized. The people who don’t like those enhancements are supermobilized, they’re superenergized, and that’s the NRA.

Q. Have researchers compared gun violence in the U.S. with gun violence in other countries? England, for example, has much stricter gun laws than we do—are there fewer crimes committed with guns there?

A. Frank Zimring is a law professor at Berkeley who wrote a terrific book in the late 90s where he points out that if you look at cities in the United Kingdom and you look at cities in the United States, the overall levels of fights and robberies and other crimes aren’t very different. It’s not that Americans are a lot more violent than the English, but our homicide rate is just off the charts compared with England. Almost all of that difference in homicides is due to gun homicides, which certainly would make you think that gun availability would be implicated as an explanation for the difference.