Free 1 Year NRA Membership - Support 2nd Amendment

[gsk3]

One issue that has not been addressed here is the issue "passive deterrent" of states that have relatively open ownership laws. Valid or not, I remember reading statistics of crime in states that went from stricter gun laws to relatively permissive laws. The information I read strongly suggested that such a situation was a passive deterrent, presumably since those who are prone to commit crimes were more careful/selective/hesitant when gun ownership is wide and "unpredictable" in a state.

I really don't recall the sources, but I'm really curious about this aspect. As Routurner pointed out, the actual incidents of self defense gun intervention will always be statistically small, but I think that the overall passive effect has the potential to have a greater effect.

Cross-sectional (i.e. looking across several units of comparison in a single point of time) analyses prove nothing. One fairly simple example of how such an analysis can draw the wrong conclusion, if states that are high-crime also tend to enact anti-gun legislation, then a cross-sectional analysis would conclude that the legislation is what caused the higher crime rates, even if the legislation actually improved crime rates. To do the study appropriately, you would need longitudinal data (repeated measures over time), adjustment for confounders in a regression-based model (one way to conceive of this would be to say that it helps ensure you are comparing apples to apples), and ideally a "natural experiment" (a gun policy change that was enacted for reasons other than increases in gun crime).

Here's a description of the studies that have been done, including the original one which found its way uncited, a dozen years later, into a casual conversation (and who says we academics have no impact! Of course impact can be to lead people astray as well as the opposite....):
Econometric Modeling as Junk Science

 

[herman]

..................
p.s. incidentally, you guys deserve a compliment. This is one of the most level-headed debates about guns I've ever seen.

Thank You, speaking for myself, many of us get tired of having to deal with the half truths, distortions and out right lyes and tend to get a little heated at times. This debate will go on for a while. I will leave you with a interview to read and a book suggestion....and if your ever in the area, I would be happy to introduce you to some of my gun culture buddies....gotta have something to do during the SI.
Interview with John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime

 

[gsk3]

Thank You, speaking for myself, many of us get tired of having to deal with the half truths, distortions and out right lyes and tend to get a little heated at times. This debate will go on for a while. I will leave you with a interview to read and a book suggestion....and if your ever in the area, I would be happy to introduce you to some of my gun culture buddies....gotta have something to do during the SI.
Interview with John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime

Again, a specific rebuttal to Lott was in the link I posted ;-)

Within a year, two determined econometricians, Dan Black and Daniel Nagin (1998) published a study showing that if they changed the statistical model a little bit, or applied it to different segments of the data, Lott and Mustard's findings disappeared. Black and Nagin found that when Florida was removed from the sample there was "no detectable impact of the right-to-carry laws on the rate of murder and rape." They concluded that "inference based on the Lott and Mustard model is inappropriate, and their results cannot be used responsibly to formulate public policy."

John Lott, however, disputed their analysis and continued to promote his own. Lott had collected data for each of America's counties for each year from 1977 to 1992. The problem with this is that America's counties vary tremendously in size and social characteristics. A few large ones, containing major cities, account for a very large percentage of the murders in the United States. As it happens, none of these very large counties have "shall issue" gun control laws. This means that LottÃÔ massive data set was simply unsuitable for his task. He had no variation in his key causal variable "shall issue" laws in the places where most murders occurred.

I grew up in gun culture. I own a gun and know how to use it. I have no problem with gun culture. I do have a problem with opposition to non-extreme measures to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, simply because you're afraid of a slippery slope.