Sunday, July 22, 2007
Guns = less crime: Equation doesn't hold up
From the RoundTable blog
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Sabina Thaler
Thaler lives in Roanoke and is a member of Virginia Tech's graduating class of 2007.
Joe Painter presented a compelling challenge in the June 14 issue of The Roanoke Times ("Upholding the right to bear arms," Commentary page).
By way of a specific scientific analysis, Painter hypothesized that more guns equal less crime. Because I love a good debate, and because I believe my rights to not be searched or shot are greater than your right to bear arms, I am accepting this challenge.
While Painter develops an excellent hypothesis, he commits the serious fallacy of approaching the data from the perspective of a lawyer as opposed to that of a scientist. The difference between lawyers and scientists is that lawyers seek to prove their side right; whereas, scientists go to great lengths to prove they're wrong.
I admit John Lott and David Mustard's data, to which Painter refers, sound convincing. Indeed, if these results are accurate we can no longer find irony with conservatives who are simultaneously pro-life and pro-gun.
Luckily for the challenge at hand, Lott and Mustard's study is plagued with errors. For one, this study relies on the premise that guns are uniformly used for protection. In other words, when using a gun defensively, a person will behave the same regardless of his or her age, sex, social status, gang affiliation, etc.
If this seems plausible, read Stephen Schnebly's analysis of the impact of the victim on defensive gun use. Schnebly finds that victims behave differently when using a gun for protection. A woman is much less likely to fire a gun in defending herself than is a man. In fact, with the exception of domestic situations, statistically a woman is in more danger if she attempts to use a firearm to protect herself than she would be without a gun.
Readers might be thinking: "Schnebly's theory does not necessarily disprove Lott and Mustard's theory. Couldn't there still be a chance that, even when controlling for this disparity, guns will prove their superior powers of crime control?"
No.
In 1998 two scientists, Hashem Dezhbakhsh and Paul Rubin, sensed something fishy with Lott and Mustard's study. Dezbakhish and Rubin decided to see what would happen if they replaced Lott and Mustard's "dummy" variables with the crime rate that actually occurred. To the National Rifle Association's dismay, they found that Lott and Mustard's theory did not hold up in the real world.
In many cases, Lott and Mustard's concealed gun laws are correlated with an increase in crime; for those few instances where guns are correlated with lessened crime, the difference is much less significant than Lott and Mustard theorized. The reason people don't tout Lott and Mustard's analysis is because it was based on several problematic assumptions that ultimately devastated and discredited their findings.
Crime is almost certainly caused by multiple factors. Guns should not be America's whipping boy. Nevertheless, guns make taking lives too easy. We cannot identify and detain every potential criminal; but, by eliminating firearms, we will make it much more difficult for robbers to become murderers.
