From: [72270 760] at [compuserve.com] (Wayne Dougherty)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns
Subject: Lott response to Nagin-Black criticisms
Date: Wed, 09 Apr 1997 19:22:45 GMT

Washington Post
Apr. 9, 1997
Letters to the Editor

Concealed Handguns and Crime

  Richard Morin's "Unconventional Wisdom" column [Outlook,
March 23] contained several mistakes about my recent study
of gun-control laws. I found that allowing law-abiding
citizens to carry concealed handguns deters criminals and
reduces violent crime, with murder rates falling by at least
8 percent.
  Mr. Morin's column cited research by Dan Black and Dan
Nagin from Carnegie Mellon University claiming that they
found "the annual murder rate did go down in six of the 10
states_but it went up in the other four, including a 100
percent increase in West Virginia." Similar claims are made
for rape and robbery rates.
  But this is an apples-and-oranges error. Mr. Black and Mr.
Nagin did not use evidence based on what happened to these
states' crime rates but on the crime rates for _counties with
more than 100,000 people._ For example, in West Virginia this
means examining only one county--Kanawha. The other 54
counties in West Virginia, with 89 percent of the state's
population, were excluded from their estimates. In fact, the
Black-Nagin analysis eliminated 85 percent of all U.S.
counties.
  When I made estimates using all counties, I certainly did
not obtain "wildly" different estimates across states, as
Mr. Black is quoted as saying. Violent crime rates fell in
nine of the 10 new states that enacted right-to-carry laws
between 1977 and 1992. The only variations among those
states can be explained by differences in the rate that
concealed-handgun permits were issued. States that issued
more permits experienced greater reductions in crime.
  Nor were my projections based on "county-level crime data
collected by the FBI in 19 states that passed so-called
[right-to-carry] laws between 1977 and 1992." I did use FBI
data, but for _all_ 3,054 counties in _all_ 50 states and the
District of Columbia for these 16 years, and 18 states had
passed these laws by 1992.
  I have made these data available to academics at any
university who have requested them. To date, that amounts to
24 universities, including: University of Pennsylvania,
Emory University, University of Texas and Vanderbilt
University. No one has had any trouble replicating the
study's results, and I believe that discussions with these
scholars would have supported our findings.
                                            JOHN R. LOTT JR.
                                                     Chicago

  The writer is the John M. Olin law and economics fellow at
the University of Chicago Law School.