Gun Control, an Effective Deterrent to Crime?

Gun Control, an Effective Deterrent to Crime?

Rich Morse

19 November, 2014

Gun Control, an Effective Deterrent to Crime?

Crime and guns. The two seem to go hand in hand with one another but are the two really associated? Do guns necessarily lead to crime? And if so do laws placing restrictions on firearm ownership and use stop the crime or protect the citizens? These are the questions many citizens and lawmakers are asking themselves when setting about to create gun control laws. The debate over gun control, however, is nothing new and continues to this day. The question at the heart of the matter is, does gun control effectively deter crime, encourage it, or have little to no effect at all?

Lott and Mustard conducted research on the effects of concealed carry of guns in deterring crime. They conducted a cross-sectional time-series data for U.S. counties from 1977 to 1992. They asked themselves "will allowing concealed handguns make it likely that otherwise law-abiding citizens will harm each other? Or will the threat of citizens carrying weapons primarily deter criminals"? Utilizing the FBI's Uniformed Crime Report Lott and Mustard gathered detailed county-level data on a variety of crimes over 3,054 counties during the period from 1977 to 1992 and was the first study to use cross-sectional time-series evidence for counties at both the national level and for individual states. Instead of simply using cross-sectional state- or city-level data. In their research they found that allowing citizens without criminal records or histories of significant mental illness to carry concealed handguns deters violent crimes (Lott and Mustard, 1997). I did not wish to spend too much time talking about Lott and Mustards's research because it is older. However, I felt that it was worthy of mention because it is heavily cited and referenced to this day as well as debated.

In a paper written by Plassmann and Tideman, they used a Posisson- lognormal model to analyze intertemporal and geographical variations in the effects of right to carry laws on murders, rapes, and robberies. For each of the categories, their estimates suggested that the existence of statistically significant deterrent effects of right to carry laws for the majority of the 10 states that had adopted such laws between 1977 and 1992 but also found that some of the states experienced statistically significant increases in the numbers of other crimes. On the one hand, these results indicate that right to carry laws do not always have the deterrent effect on crime that are envisioned by some, especially politicians, and that the adoption of such laws are not without risks. On the other hand, it would be imprudent to make it more difficult for law abiding citizens to carry concealed weapons as long as there exists a large number of guns that can and will be used by criminals to commit crimes, because on average right to carry laws do help to reduce the number of these crimes (Plassmann and Tideman, 2001).

Multiple cross- sectional studies conducted by Siegel et al, have demonstrated a correlation between higher gun ownership at the state level and higher overall state specific rates of firearm homicide. They reported that there is a strong relationship between gun ownership in the 50 states and firearm homicide rates over the period 1981 to 2010. In this article they reported and analyzed stranger and nonstranger homicides at the state level during the period from 1981 to 2010 and examined the relationship between those rates and state specific household gun ownership during the same years. They adopted the Bureau of Justice Studies definition of stranger and nonstranger homicide. Stranger homicide is when the victim did not know the offender or knew the offender only by sight. Nonstranger homicide is when the victim is either related to, well known to, or casually acquainted with the victim (Bureau of Justice Studies, 2014).To the best of the author's collective knowledge this was the first study to report state specific data on stranger and nonstranger homicide rates and examine the relationship between state level gun ownership and stranger and nonstranger homicide rates (Siegel et al).

While using a Panel of annual data for 1981 to 2010 for each of the 50 states, they modeled the stranger and nonstranger firearm homicide rates in a given year for a given state as a function of gun ownership, measured by a proxy, in that state during that year, while controlling for factors that might confound the association. They obtained stranger and nonstranger homicide data from the Supplemental Homicide Reports (SHR) of the FBI’s Uniformed Crime Report (UCR). Although a substantial number of SHR records are missing data on the victim- offender