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27 J. Legal Stud. 209 (1998)
Do Right-to-Carry Laws Deter Violent Crime

handle is hein.journals/legstud27 and id is 215 raw text is: DO RIGHT-TO-CARRY LAWS DETER VIOLENT CRIME? DAN A. BLACK and DANIEL S. NAGIN* ABSTRACT John R. Lott and David B. Mustard conclude that right-to-carry laws deter violent crime. Our reanalysis of Lott and Mustard's data provides no basis for drawing confident conclusions about the impact of right-to-carry laws on violent crime. We document that their results are highly sensitive to small changes in their model and sample. Without Florida in the sample, there is no detectable impact of right-to- carry laws on the rate of murder and rape, the two crimes that by the calculations of Lott and Mustard account for 80 percent of the social benefit of right-to-carry laws. A more general model based on year-to-year differences yields no evidence of significant impact for any type of violent crime. As a result, inference based on the Lott and Mustard model is inappropriate, and their results cannot be used re- sponsibly to formulate public policy. I. INTRODUCTION BY 1992, 18 states had enacted laws creating a presumptive right to carry a concealed handgun.' Such laws require that an adult applicant be granted a concealed-weapon permit unless the individual is a felon or has a history of serious mental illness. In a highly publicized article, John R. Lott and David B. Mustard conclude that right-to-carry laws deter violent crimes, in- crease crimes of stealth, and have no effect on the number of accidental deaths. They argue that rational criminals substitute away from violent crimes and instead engage in property crimes, such as burglary and larceny, * We thank John Lott for providing the data, for many helpful conversations, and for com- ments on previous drafts. Steven Levitt provided detailed, insightful comments. We also thank Ian Ayres, Susan Black, Al Blumstein, Steve Bronars, Jacqueline Cohen, Philip Cook, Laura Dugan, John Ham, Dan Hamermesh, Thomas Marvel, David McDowall, Jens Ludwig, Greg Pogarsky, Jeffrey Smith, Joel Waldfogel, and seminar participants at the Carnegie Mellon/University of Pittsburgh Applied Microeconomics Workshop, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and Yale University for comments on earlier versions of the article. The National Consortium on Violence Research at the Heinz School of Carnegie Mellon University pro- vided us with financial support. John R. Lott and David B. Mustard, Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns, 26 J Leg Stud 1, 12 (1997). [Journal of Legal Studies, vol. XXVII (January 1998)] © 1998 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0047-2530/98/2701-0008$01.50

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