From: [k--m] at [cv.hp.com] (Keith Marchington) Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns,alt.conspiracy Subject: Re: University of Maryland Homicide Study Date: 24 Mar 1995 16:41:11 GMT Initial Evaluation of University of Maryland/CDC Study of State Right to Carry Laws(1) by Paul H. Blackman, Ph.D. (March 17, 1995) This study is being rushed into the public debate before publication in a "peer reviewed" journal(2) in an effort to influence decision making. The title is misleading: Since Florida's homicide rate has been falling dramatically since adopting right-to-carry legislation, the study looks only at three counties within the state, at one county in Mississippi, and at three counties in Oregon.(3) The study is by the same research group which studied a handgun ban in Washington,(4) D.C., and pretended they had shown a dramatic decrease in homicide, even as Washington's homicide rate first inched upward, declined slightly in response to a mandatory- penalty provision, and finally skyrocketed to set national records for big-city homicide rates. That study established the researchers' anti-gun bona fides for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which is thus funding this study. It uses the same discredited(5) methodology employed in their earlier study, one which is unable to isolate or test various other factors which might lead to changes in homicide trends (demographic changes, sentencing and other legislative changes, trends in drug trafficking, etc.). Having proven to their own and the CDC's satisfaction that D.C.'s handgun ban reduced homicide even as the homicide rate tripled, the same authors now assert that right-to- carry legislation increases homicide even though the states adopting it have homicide rates which are defying the dramatic national murder-rate increase. The only thing that the methodology used in this research can show is whether there was a temporary or permanent, sharp or gradual, change in a measured item -- in this case, homicide, as all other violent crime is ignored -- at a given point in time; testing different points of time will often lead to various other time frames similarly indicating changes, whether there was any explanation for the change or not. The methodology cannot, however, explain why a change occurred, or which of a variety of factors explained it; it is pure post hoc ergo propter hoc even though there may have been nothing happening to prompt the change. By averaging homicides or homicide rates for a long period of time -- nearly 15 years for two Florida counties and over that for the Mississippi and Oregon counties -- prior to adoption of the law, impacts of the carry reform are disguised by relatively low homicide rates in the early '70s and the early '80s; worse, the authors changed the time frame used for Miami -- adopting a 1983 rather than an 1973 starting point. If they used the same time frame, it would have appeared that Miami's homicide rate had declined sharply,(6) using the pre-law averaging method they like to report. They thus excluded some high homicide rate years which would make the post-law period seem a decline. The use of long pre-law time periods can obscure high homicide rates in years immediately before right-to-carry reform. The study used only three Florida counties, representing one-fourth of the state's population, one Mississippi county, representing one-tenth of the population, and three Oregon counties, representing over 40% of the state's population and where even their study showed a decline in homicide. The authors noted a 21% homicide rate decline in Florida by 1992, the end-point for their research.(7) The research uses National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) data on "homicide" instead of FBI data on "murder and nonnegligent manslaughter." The major difference is that some civilian justifiable/self-defense homicides are excluded from FBI data but self-defense and justifiable homicides by civilians are normally included in NCHS data. In D.C., the difference was enough so that applying their methodology to FBI data failed to show the pretended decline the NCHS data showed, hinting that only non-criminal homicides were prevented by the handgun ban. Similar use of the wrong data here could disguise more defensive gun homicides. More importantly, the study utterly ignores the fact that the law affects only carrying of handguns in public, not possession. There were no data reported on homicides involving persons with carry permits -- presumably because there were no such criminal homicides. The authors hypothesized that criminals might increase unlawful carrying where law-abiding people are allowed to carry, but presented no data or citation to any other study to support the hypothesis. The study also ignored the location of homicides. In a previous study of Detroit in which the same authors were involved,(8) the authors at least acknowledged that one would have to look at circumstances where carrying was involved in order to evaluate the change -- and in that study nearly half of the homicides were indoors, where carrying either with or without a permit was largely irrelevant. The authors separated gun-related from non-gun-related homicides, ignoring the distinction between handguns, subject to liberalized carry laws, and other firearms, and found greater increase in gun than non-gun homicide, just as their D.C. study found a greater decrease in gun than non-gun homicides. Criminologically, firearms crime leads homicide trends, either upward or downward, since such fluctuations are normally indications of crime trends among active criminals, who are more apt to use firearms. Thus, unsurprisingly, the sharp drop in Florida's homicide rate since adopting its right-to-carry law was faster for gun- than for non-gun-related homicides. Disingenuously, the lead author has asserted that a possible reason for Portland's decline in homicide is that, while adopting right-to-carry, it also toughened its waiting period provision. But Prof. McDowall has, using the same methodology, concluded that "waiting periods have no influence on either gun homicides or gun suicides."(9) Incredibly, the authors suggest that laws against carrying in public are "easy to enforce and they do not inconvenience most gun owners." Easy enforcement may be relatively true of laws regulating licensed firearms manufacturers, importers, dealers, and distributors, and enforcement of carrying in public may be easier than enforcement of possession bans in the home. But concealed carry laws are very difficult to enforce without violating Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.(10) In short, the study ignores that lawful carrying is apparently involved in none of the criminal homicides reported, it uses unrepresentative and small segments of three states' populations, it uses carefully selected time frames, it uses a discredited methodology which makes it impossible to isolate possible causal factors for trends, it uses data which counts criminal and self- defense homicides as equally bad, and it sloughs over the fact that the homicide trend nationally was increasing while dropping in two of the three states allegedly studied, and rising minimally in Mississippi.(11) ---------------------------- (1) David McDowall, Colin Loftin, and Brian Wiersema. Easing Conceal Firearm Laws: Effects on Homicide in Three States. Violence Research Group Discussion Paper 15. College Park, Md.: University of Maryland, January 1995. (2) The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology is to publish the study this summer, in a symposium of "gun control" papers edited by David McDowall, lead author of the paper. (3) Indeed, they only wanted to look at one county, Multnomah, containing Portland, but found too few homicides and so expanded to three counties, all described to the news media as "Portland." (4) Colin Loftin, et al. Effects of Restrictive Licensing of Handguns on Homicide and Suicide in the District of Columbia. New England Journal of Medicine 325:1615-1620 (1991). (5) Gary Kleck, Chester L. Britt, and David J. Bordua. The Emperor Has No Clothes: Using Interrupted Time Series Design to Evaluate Social Policy Impact. Paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, Phoenix, 1993. (6) "Except in Miami, we studied the period between January 1973 and December 1992 (240 months). Miami homicides increased sharply in May 1980, following an influx of refugees from Cuba. Miami's monthly homicide totals appeared to stabilize by late 1982, and we thus analyzed the period from January 1983 through December 1992 (120 months)." (7) Through 1993, the handgun-related homicide rate in Florida had fallen some 29% in Florida while rising 50% nationally. (8) Patrick O'Carroll, et al. Preventing Homicide: An Evaluation of the Efficacy of a Detroit Gun Ordinance. American Journal of Public Health 81:576-581 (1991). (9) David McDowall. Preventive Effects of Firearm Regulations on Injury Mortality. Paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, Phoenix, Arizona, 1993. (10) Paul Bendis and Steven Balkin. A Look at Gun Control Enforcement. Journal of Police Science and Administration 7:439- 448 (1979); and J. Star. Why the gun law doesn't work. Chicago 27:128-131+ (February 1978). (11) FBI Uniform Crime Reports. Crime in the United States, 1987, 1989, 1990, and 1993. 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