[quote]Cockney Blue wrote:
And here is some oposition to the previous link
Opposition
Academic studies that have rejected Lott’s conclusions include the following. With the exception of the 2003 study by John J. Donohue, these studies generally contend that there seems to be little or no effect on crime from the passage of license-to-carry laws. Donohue’s 2003 study finds an increase in violence. (This is contradicted by Moody and Marvell’s September 2008 study in Econ Journal Watch; a response from Donohue and Ayres will be forthcoming in the January 2009 issue.)
David Hemenway, ‘Review of More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws’, New England Journal of Medicine, 1998.[10] Hemenway’s review states
Lott finds, for example, that both increasing the rate of unemployment and reducing income reduces the rate of violent crimes and that reducing the number of black women 40 years old or older (who are rarely either perpetrators or victims of murder) substantially increases murder rates. Indeed, according to Lott’s results, getting rid of older black women will lead to a more dramatic rise in homicide rates than increasing arrest rates or enacting shall-issue laws
Rutgers sociology professor Ted Goertzel stated that “Lott?s massive data set was simply unsuitable for his task”, and that he “compar[ed] trends in Idaho and West Virginia and Mississippi with trends in Washington, D.C. and New York City” without proper statistical controls. He alleged that econometric methods are susceptible to misuse and can even become junk science. [11]
Ian Ayres, Yale Law School, and John Donohue, Stanford Law School, ‘Shooting Down the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis’. Stanford Law Review, 2003.[12]
Jens Ludwig, Georgetown University, “Concealed-Gun-Carrying Laws and Violent Crime: Evidence from State Panel Data”, published in International Review of Law and Economics, 1998.[13].
Dan Black and Daniel Nagin, “Do ‘Right-to-Carry’ Laws Deter Violent Crime?” Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 209-213 (January 1998).
Mark Duggan, University of Chicago, “More Guns, More Crime,” National Bureau of Economic Research, NBER Working Paper No. W7967, October 2000, later published in Journal of Political Economy.[14]
Steven Levitt, University of Chicago, ‘Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s: Four Factors that Explain the Decline and Six that Do Not’. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2004.[15] Levitt lists ‘Laws allowing a right to carry concealed weapons’ as number five in his list of ‘Six Factors that Played Little or No Role in the Crime Decline’.
Jeffrey Miron, Boston University, ‘Violence, Guns, and Drugs: A Cross-Country Analysis’. The Journal of Law and Economics, October 2001.[16]
Tomislav V. Kovandzic and Thomas B. Marvell, “Right-To-Carry Concealed Firearms and Violent Crime: Crime Control Through Gun Decontrol?” Criminology and Public Policy 2, (2003) pages 363-396.
John J. Donahue III, Stanford Law School, ‘The Final Bullet in the Body of the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis’, Criminology and Public Policy, 2003.[17]
[edit] Ambiguous results
Academic studies that have both agreed and disagreed with aspects of Lott’s conclusions include the following.
David E. Olson, Loyola University Chicago, and Michael D. Maltz, University of Illinois at Chicago, “Right-to-carry concealed weapons laws and homicide in large U.S. counties: the effect on weapon types, victim characteristics, and victim-offender relationships,” The Journal of Law and Economics, October 2001.[18] [/quote]
You can download Lott’s 29 page rebuttal here. It is an interesting read.
Abstract:
Ian Ayres and John Donohue (1999) provide a useful and positive review of my book “More Guns, Less Crime,” and I agree with the directions in which they believe that more work can be done. Yet, there are some serious factual errors in their review and they also never discuss some of the strongest evidence. Finally, I was disappointed that they think that I had not responded to some previous objections raised to my research. Hopefully this response can help explain why these criticisms were mistaken.