Criminological Theory and Criminal Justice Policy
On Deterrence ancd Protection From Violence
Will IVIore Guns Mean Less Crime? John R. Lott, Jr.
A H merican culture is a gun culture—notS merely in the sense that 75 to 86 million I people own a total of about 200 to 240
million guns, but in the broader sense that guns pervade our debates on crime and are constantly p r e s e n t in movies and the news. How many times have we read about shootings, or how many times have we heard about tragic acciden- tal gun deaths—bad guys sbooting innocent vic- tims, had guys shooting each other in drug wars, shots fired in self-defense, police shootings of criminals, let alone shooting in wars? We are inundated by images through the television and the press. Our kids are fascinated by computer war games and toy guns.
So we're obsessed witb guns. But the big ques- tion is: What do we really know? How many times have most of ufe actually used a gun or seen a gun being used? How many of us have ever seen some- body in real life threatening somebody else with a gun, witnessed a shdoting, or seen people defend themselves by displaying or firing guns?
The truth is that niost of us have very little firsthand experience with using guns as weapons. Even the vast majority of police officers have never exchanged shots with a suspect. Most of us receive our images of guns and their use through television, film, and newspapers.
Unfortunately, the images from the screen and the newspapers are often unrepresentative or biased because of the sensationalism and exaggeration typ- ically employed to sell news and entertainment. While news stories sometimes chronicle the defen- sive uses of guns, such discussions are rare com- pared to those depicting violent crime committed with giins. Since in many defensive cases a handgun is sirhply brandished, and no one is harmed, many defensive uses are never even reported to the pólice. I believe that this imderreporting of defensive gun use is large, and this belief has been confirmed by the many stories I received from people across the
Mr. Lott teaches criminal deterrence and law and eco- nomics at the University of Chicago, where he is the John M. Olin Law and Economics Fellow. He is author of More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crinie and Gun Con- trol Laws, from which this article is excerpted, with per- mission of the publisher, the University of Chicago Press. Copyright 1998 the University of Chicago.
country after the publicity broke on my original study in the Journal of Legal Studies.
If national surveys are correct, 98% of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack. Such stories are not hard to find: pizza delivery- men defend themselves against robbers, carjack- ings are thwarted, robberies at automatic teller machines are prevented, and numerous armed robberies on the streets and in stores are foiled, though these do not receive the national coverage of other gun crimes. Yet the cases covered by the news media are h a r d l y typical; most of t h e encounters reported involve a shooting that ends in a fatality. Indeed, some conventional wisdom claims t h a t the best approach is not to resist attack. According to a recent Los Angeles Times article, "'active compliance' is the surest way to survive a robbery. Victims wbo engage in active resistance...have the best odds of hanging on to their property. Unfortunately, they also have much better odds of winding up dead."
While resistance is generally associated with higher probabilities of serious injury to the victim, not all types of resistance are equally risky. By examining the data provided from 1979 to 1987 by the Department of Justice's National Crime Vic- timization Survey, Lawrence Southwick of SUNY, Buffalo found tbat the probability of serious injury
18 Consumers' Research
from an attack is 2.5 times greater for women offering no resistance than for women resisting vrith a gun. In contrast, the probability of women being seriously injured was almost four times greater when resisting without a gun than when resisting with a gun. In other words, the best advice is to resist with a gun, but if no gun is avail- able, it is better to offer no resistance than to fight.
Men also fare better with guns, but the bene- fits are significantly smaller. Behaving passively is 1.4 times more likely to result in serious injury t h a n resisting with a gun. Male victims, like females, also run the greatest risk when they resist without a gun, yet the difference is again much smaller: resistance without a gun is only 1.5 times as likely to result in serious injury than resistance with a gun. The much smaller differ- ence for men reflects the fact that a gun produces a smaller change in a man's ability to defend him- self than it does for a woman.
Although usually skewed toward the dramatic, news stories do shed light on how criminals think. Anecdotes about criminals who choose victims whom they perceive as weak are the most typical. While "weak" victims are frequently women and the elderly, this is not always the case. For exam- ple, in a taped conversation with police investiga- tors reported in The Cincinnati Enquirer, Darnall "Bubba" Lowery described how he and Walter "Fatman" Raglin robbed and murdered musician Michael Bany on December 29,1995:
"Mr. Lowery said on tape that he and Walter 'Fatman' Raglin, who is also charged with aggra- vated robbery and aggravated murder and is on trial in another courtroom, had planned to rob a cab driver or a 'dope boy. '
"He said he gave his gun and bullets to Mr. Raglin. They decided against robbing a cab driver or drug dealer because both sometimes carried guns, he said.
"Instead, they saw a man walking across the parking lot with some kind of musical instrument. He said as he looked out for police, Mr. Raglin approached the man and asked for money.
"After getting the money, Mr. Raglin asked if the man's car was a stick or an automatic shift. Then Mr. Raglin shot the man. "
Criminals are motivated by self-preservation, and handguns can therefore be a deterrent. The potential defensive nature of guns is further evi- denced by the different rates of so-called "hot burglaries," where a resident is at home when a criminal strikes. In Canada and Britain, both with tough gun-control laws, almost half of all burglaries are "hot burglaries." In contrast, the United States, with fewer restrictions, has a "hot burglary" rate of only 13%. Criminals are not just
behaving differently by accident. Convicted Amer- ican felons reveal in surveys that they are much more worried about armed victims than about running into the police. The fear of potentially armed victims causes American burglars to spend more time than their foreign counterparts "cas- ing" a house to ensure t h a t nobody is home. Felons frequently comment in these interviews t h a t they avoid late-night burglaries because "that's the way to get shot."
To an economist such as myself, the notion of deterrence—which causes criminals to avoid cab drivers, "dope boys," or homes where the resi- dents are in—is not too surprising. We see the
Unfortunately, the debate over crime involves many commonly accepted 'facts' that simply are not true.
same basic relationships in all other aireas of life: when the price of apples rises relative to that of oranges, people buy fewer apples and more oranges. To the non-economist, it may appear cold to make this comparison, but just as grocery shoppers switch to cheaper types of produce, criminals switch to attacking more vulnerable prey. Economists call this, appropriately enough, "the substitution effect."
Deterrence m a t t e r s not only to those who actively t a k e defensive actions. People who defend themselves may indirectly benefit other citizens. Cab drivers and drug dealers who carry guns produce a benefit for cab drivers and drug dealers without guns. In the example involving "hot burglaries," homeowners who defend them- selves make burglars generally wary of breaking into homes. These spillover effects are frequently referred to as "third-party effects" or "external benefits." In both cases criminals cannot know in advance who is armed.
The case for allowing concealed handguns—as opposed to openly carried handguns—relies on this argument. When guns are concealed, crimi- nals are unable to tell whether the victim is armed before striking, which raises the risk to criminals of committing many types of crimes. On the other hand, with "open-carry" handgun laws, a potential victim's defensive ability is readily identified, which makes it easier for criminals to choose the more vulnerable prey. In interviews with felony prisoners in 10 state correctional sys- tems, 56% claimed that they would not attack a potential victim who was known to be armed. Indeed, the criminals in states with high civilian
December 1998 19
Two Gun Debate iVIyths: • The United States has a high murder rate
because Americans own so many guns: There is no international evidence backing this up. The Swiss, New Zealanders, and Finns all own guns as frequently as Americans, yet in 1995 Switzerland had a murder rate 40% lower than Germany's, and New Zealand had one lower than Australia's. Finland and Sweden have very different gun ownership rates, but very similar murder rates. Israel, with a high- er gun ownership, has had the greatest drop in violent crime rates.
• The family gun is more likely to kill you or someone you know than to kill in self-defense. The 1993 study yielding such numbers, pub- lished in The New England Journal of Medicine, never actually inquired as to whose gun was used in the kiUing. Instead, if a house- hold owned a gun and if a person in t h a t household was shot to death while in the home, the gun in the household was blamed. In fact, virtually all tbe killings in the study were committed with guns brought in by an intruder. No more tban 4% of the gun deaths in the study can be attributed to the home- owner's gun.
gun ownership were the most worried about encountering armed victims.
Substitutability means that the most obvious explanations may not always be correct. For example, when the February 23, 1997, sbooting at the Empire State Building left one person dead and six injured, it was not New York's gun laws but Florida's—where the gun was sold—that came u n d e r a t t a c k . New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani immediately called for national gun-licensing laws. While it is possible that even stricter gun-sale regulations in Florida might have prevented this and other shootings, we might ask: Why did the gunman travel to New York and not simply remain in Florida to do the shooting? It is important to study whether states t h a t adopt concealed-handgun laws similar to those in Israel experience the same virtual elimi- nation of mass public sbootings. Such states may also run the risk that would-be attackers will sub- stitute bombings for shootings, though there is the same potential downside to successfully ban- ning guns. The question still boils down to an empirical one: Wbicb policy will save tbe largest number of lives?
The Numbers Debate and Crime. Unfortunately, the debate over crime involves many commonly accepted "facts" that simply are not true . For example, take the claim that individuals are fre- quently killed by people they know. According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, 58% of the country's murders were committed either by fami- ly members (18%) or by those who "knew" the vic- tims (40%). Although the victims' relationship to their attackers could not be determined in 30% of the cases, 13% of aU murders were committed by complete strangers.
Siurely the impression created by these numbers has been tbat most victims are murdered by close acquaintances. Yet this is far from the truth. In interpreting the numhers, one must understand how these classifications are made. In this case, "murderers who know their victims" is a very broad category. A buge but not clearly determined portion of this category includes rival gang mem- bers who know each other. In larger urban areas, where most murders occur, the majority of murders are due to gang-related turf wars over drugs.
The Chicago Police Department, which keeps unusually detailed numbers on these crimes, fmds that just 5% of all murders in the city fi'om 1990 to 1995 were committed by nonfamüy friends, neigh- bors, or roommates. Tbis is clearly important in understanding crime. Tbe Kst of nonfriend acquain- tance murders is filled with cases in which the rela- tionships would not he regarded by most people as particularly close: for example, relationships between drug pushers and huyers, gang members, prostitutes and tbeir clients, bar customers, gam- blers, and cabdrivers killed by their customers.
Claims of the large number of murders commit- ted against acquaintances also create a misleading fear of tbose we know. To put it bluntly, criminals are not typical citizens. As is well known, young males fi'om tbeir mid-teens to mid-thirties commit a disproportionate share of crime, hut even this cat- egorization can be substantially narrowed. We know that criminals tend to have low IQs as well as atypical personalities. For example, delinquents generally tend to be more "assertive, unafraid, aggressive, unconventional, extroverted, and poorly socialized," while nondeliquents are "self-con- trolled, concemed about their relations with others, willing to be guided by social standards, and rich in internal feelings like insecurity, helplessness, love (or its lack), and anxiety," as criminologists James Q. Wilson and Richard Herstein have reported. Other evidence indicates that criminals tend to be more impulsive and put relatively little weight on future events.
The news media also play an important role in shaping what we perceive as the greatest threats
20 Consumers' Research
to our safety. Because we live in such a national news m a r k e t , we l e a r n very quickly about tragedies in other parts of the country. As a result, some events appear to be much more common than they actually are. For instance, children are much less likely to be accidentally killed by guns (particularly heindguns) than most people think. Consider the following numbers: in 1995 there were a total of 1,400 accidental firearm deaths in the entire country. A relatively small portion of these involved children: 30 deaths involved chil- dren up to four years of age and 170 more deaths involved five- to 14-year-olds. In comparison, 2,900 children died in motor-vehicle crashes, 950 children lost their lives from drowning, and over 1,000 children were killed hy fire and burns. More children die in bicycle accidents each year than die from all types of firearm accidents.
Of course, any child's death is tragic, and it offers little consolation to point out that common fixtures in life from pools to heaters result in even more deaths. Yet the very rules that seek to save lives can result in more deaths. For example, ban- ning swimming pools would help prevent drown- ing, and banning bicycles would eliminate bicycling accidents, but if fewer people exercise, life spans wiU be shortened. Heaters may start fires, but they also keep people from getting sick and from freez- ing to death. So, whether we want to allow pools or space heaters depends not only on whether some people may be harme d by them, but also on whether more people are helped than hurt.
Similar trade-offs exist for gun-control issues, such as gun locks. As President CUnton has argued many times, "We protect aspirin bottles in this country better than we protect guns from accidents by children." Yet gun locks require that guns be imloaded, and a locked, unloaded gun does not offer ready protection from intruders. The debate is not simply over whether one wants to save lives or not;
American felons reveal in surveys that they are much more worried about armed victims than about running into police. The fear of potentially armed victims causes American burglars to spend more time than their foreign counter- parts 'casing' a house to ensure nobody is home.
it involves the question of how many of these 200 accidental gun deaths would have been avoided under different rules versus the extent to which such rules would reduce people's ability to defend themselves. Without looking at data, one can only guess the net effects. Unfortunately, despite the best intentions, evidence indicates that child-resis- tant bottle caps actually have resulted in "3,500 additional poisonings of children under age five annually from [aspirin-related drugs]...[as] con- sumers have been liiUed into a less-safety-conscious mode of behavior by the existence of safety caps," according to research by Kip Viscusi, of Harvard University. If President Clinton were aware of such research, he surely wouldn't refer to aspirin bottles when telling us how to deal with guns.
Another common argument made in favor of banning guns involves the number of people who die from guns each year: t h e r e were 17,790 homicides and 18,169 suicides in 1992 alone. Yet just because a law is passed to ban guns, it does not automatically follow that the total number of deaths will dechne. Given the large stock of guns in the country, and given the difficulties the government faces in preventing other illegal items, such as drugs, from entering the country, it is not clear how successful the government would be in eliminating most guns. This raises t h e i m p o r t a n t question of w h e t h e r t h e law would primarily reduce the number of guns held hy law-abiding citizens. How would such a law alter the relative balance of power between crim- inals and law-abiding citizens?
Our primary questions therefore should be the following: Will allowing citizens to carry concealed handguns mean that otherwise law-abiding people will harm each other? Will the t h r e at of self- defense by citizens armed with guns primarily deter criminals? Without a doubt, both "bad" and "good" uses of guns occur. The question isn't really whether both occur; it is, rather. Which is more important? In general, do concealed handguns save or cost lives? Even a devoted believer in deterrence cannot answer this question without examining
December 1998 21
the data, because these two different effects clearly exist, and they work In opposite directions.
To some, however, the logic is fairly straight- forward. Philip Cook, an economist at Duke Uni- versity, argues that "if you introduce a gun into a violent encounter, it increases the chance that someone will die. " A large number of murders may arise from unintentional fits of rage that are quickly regretted, and simply keeping guns out of people's reach would prevent deaths. Oth- ers point to the horrible public shootings that occur not just in the United States but around the world, from Tasmania, Australia, to Dun- blane, Scotland.
The survey evidence of defensive gun use weighs importantly in this debate. At the lowest end of these estimates, again according to Philip Cook, the U.S. Department of Justice's National Crime Victimization Survey reports that each year there are "only" 108,000 defensive uses of guns during assaults, robberies, and household burglaries. Other national polls weight regions by population and thus have the advantage, unlike the National Crime Victimization Survey, of not relying too heavily on data from urban areas. These national polls should also produce more honest answers, since a law-enforcement agency is not asking the questions. They imply much higher defensive use rates. Fifteen national polls, including those by organizations such as the Los Angeles Times, Gallup, and Peter Hart Research Associates, imply that there are 760,000 to 3.6 million defensive uses of guns per year. Yet even if these estimates are wrong by a very large fac- tor, they still suggest that defensive gun use is extremely common.
During state legislative hearings on concealed- handgun laws, the most commonly raised con- cerns involved fears that armed citizens would attack each other in the heat of the moment fol- lowing car accidents or accidentally shoot a police officer. The evidence shows that such fears are unfounded: although 31 states have so-called nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws, some of them decades old, there exists only one record- ed incident of a permitted, concealed handgun being used in a shooting following a traffic acci- dent, and that involved self-defense. No permit holder has ever shot a police officer, and there have been cases where permit holders have used their guns to save officers' lives. (See sidebar.)
Let us return to the fundamental issue of self-protection. For many people, the ultimate concern boils down to protection from violence. Unfortunately, our legal system cannot provide people with all the protection that they desire, and yet individuals are often prevented from
For many people, the ultimate con- cern boils down to protection from violence. Unfortunately, our legal system cannot provide people with all the protection they desire, and yet individuals are often prevent- ed from defending themselves.
defending themselves. As a Chicago cabdriver recently told me: "What good is a police officer going to do me if you pulled a knife or a gun on me right now?" Nor are rural, low-crime areas immune from these concerns. Illinois State Representative Terry Deering (Democrat) noted that "we live in areas where if we have a state trooper on duty at any given time in a whole county, we feel very fortunate." Some counties in downstate rural Illinois don't even have 24-hour police protection. The police can- not feasibly protect everybody all the time, and perhaps because of this, police officers are typi- cally sympathetic to law-abiding citizens who own guns.
Although people with concealed handgun per- mits must genereilly view the police as offering insufficient protection, it Is difficult to discern any pattern of political orientation among celebrities who have concealed-handgun permits: Bill Cosby, Cybill Shepherd, U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Howard Stern, Donald Trump, William F. Buckley, Arthur O. Sulzberg- er (chairman of The New York Times), union bosses, Laurence Rockefeller, Tom Selleck, Robert De Niro, and Erika Schwarz (the first runner-up in the 1997 Miss America Pageant). The reasons these people gave on their applica- tions for permits were quite similar. Laurence Rockefeller's reason was that he carries "large sums of money"; Arthur Sulzberger wrote that he carries "large sums of money, securities, etc."; and William Buckley listed "protection of person- al property when traveling in and about the city" as his reason. Some made their decision to carry a gun after being victims of crime. Erika Schwartz said that after a carjacking she had been afraid to drive at night.
And when The Denver Post asked Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-Colo.) "how it looks for a senator to be packing heat," he responded: "You'd be surprised how many senators have guns." Campbell said that "he needed the gun back in the days when he exhibited his Native American jewelry and traveled long distances between craft shows." ^
22 Consumers' Research
Copyright of Consumers' Research Magazine is the property of Consumers Research Magazine and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.