Lott: I don't think so. That's one of the last sentences in the book, and at that point the evidence is pretty overwhelming. There are different types of information, and they're all pointing in the same direction.
After these laws are adopted, you see a drop in violent crime, and it continues over time as the percentage of the population with permits increases. If I look at neighboring counties on either side of a state border, when one state passes its right-to-carry law, I see a drop in violent crime in that county, but the other county, right across the state border, in a state without a right-to-carry law, sees an increase in its violent crime rate. You try to control for differences in the legal system, arrest and conviction rates, different types of laws, demographics, poverty, drug prices --all sorts of things. You look at something like that, and I think it's pretty hard to come up with some other explanation. I think you're seeing some criminals move [across the state line].
You find the types of people who benefit the most from these laws. The biggest drops in crime are among women and the elderly, who are physically weaker, and in the high-crime, relatively poor areas where people are most vulnerable.
There are five or six things that one could point to that confirm different parts of the theory. I haven't heard anybody come up with a story that explains all these different pieces of evidence....Since you have all these states changing their laws at different times, it becomes harder and harder to think of some left-out factor that just happened to be changing in all these different states at the same time the right-to-carry law got changed.
Reason: A review of your book in The American Prospect claims that "his results are skewed by the inclusion of data from tiny counties with trivial rates of violent crime. In fact, when you consider only large counties and exclude Florida from the sample, his case completely falls apart." How do you respond?
Lott: When you drop out counties with fewer than 100,000 people, if anything it actually increases the size of the effect. What [the reviewer is] saying is that if you not only drop out counties with fewer than 100,000 people--which is 86 percent of the counties in the sample, so it's not just a few small counties that we're talking about--but also drop out Florida, then the changes in two of the violent crime categories, when you're just looking at the simple before-and-after averages, aren't statistically significant. But the results still imply a drop, and for robberies and aggravated assaults you still get a drop that's statistically significant.
Now, I think it's somewhat misleading to look only at the simple before-and-after averages. Take the case where violent crime rates are rising right up to the point when the law goes into effect and falling afterward, and let's say it was a perfectly symmetrical inverted V. If I were to take the average crime rate before the law goes into effect and the average afterward, where the point of the V is when the law changed, they're going to be the same. Does that mean the law had no impact? When you drop Florida from the sample, [the results] look more like this inverted V than they do when Florida is in there. So I would argue that it strengthens the results, if what you care about is the change in direction.
In any case, the bottom line to me is this: I wanted all the data that were available....I didn't pick and choose, and when somebody drops out 86 percent of the counties along with Florida, you know they must have tried all sorts of combinations. This wasn't the first obvious combination that sprang to mind. And it's the only combination they report....If, after doing all these gymnastics, and recording only one type of specification, dealing with before-and-after averages that are biased against finding a benefit, they still find only benefits, and no cost, to me that strengthens the results.
Reason: University of Florida criminologist Gary Kleck recently told The Salt Lake Tribune that "Lott has convincingly demonstrated there is no substantial detriment" from "shall issue" laws. But he questioned whether these laws could have as substantial a deterrent effect as you suggest. Kleck provided a blurb for your book, and his work is often cited by opponents of gun control. Why do you think he has trouble buying your conclusions?
Lott: Gary has had a strong opinion for a long time that, on net, guns neither reduce or increase crime. He thinks it's essentially a wash. And I'm not sure I understand how he comes to that conclusion, particularly given the survey data that indicate that many more violent crimes are stopped with guns than are perpetrated with guns. But it is something that he has written and felt strongly about for a long time. Now Gary may think that there's something else that's being left out that maybe could explain these changes in crime rates. If he can tell me what that factor is, I'd be happy to try to test it.
Reason: Do you still hear the argument that you're in the pay of the gun industry, or has that been discredited?
Lott: I think the gun control people are going to continue to bring it up. I've been in debates this year with people from Handgun Control Inc. and other gun control groups in which they asserted flat-out that I've been paid by gun makers to do this study.
Reason: When they raise this charge, how successful are you in making the point that people should be able to assess evidence and arguments on their merits and that your motives don't matter?
Lott: Well, most people aren't going to look at the data. They're not going to have the data in front of them. The credibility of the data and the message depends on whether or not they believe that the person who's telling them about the data is credible. And I think the gun control groups feel that it's a win to the extent that they even divert three minutes of a show to talking about this issue. Even if it doesn't stick in people's minds, it's still three minutes that I couldn't talk about something else.
Reason: In a working paper you wrote with University of Chicago law professor William Landes [available at papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=161637], you conclude that "shall issue" laws are especially effective at preventing mass public shootings. Given that the people who commit these crimes seem to be pretty unbalanced, if not suicidal, how does the deterrent work?
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