John R. Lott

Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns

Using cross‐sectional time‐series data for U.S. counties from 1977 to 1992, we find that allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons deters violent crimes, without increasing accidental deaths. If those states without right‐to‐carry concealed gun provisions had adopted them in 1992, county‐ and state‐level data indicate that approximately 1,500 murders would have been avoided yearly. Similarly, we predict that rapes would have declined by over 4,000, robbery by over 11,000, and aggravated assaults by over 60,000. We also find criminals substituting into property crimes involving stealth, where the probability of contact between the criminal and the victim is minimal. Further, higher arrest and conviction rates consistently reduce crime. The estimated annual gain from all remaining states adopting these laws was at least

The Reputational Penalty Firms Bear from Committing Criminal Fraud

5.74 billion in 1992. The annual social benefit from an additional concealed handgun permit is as high as

The Reputational Penalties for Environmental Violations: Empirical Evidence

5,000.

On the Determinants and Importance of Punitive Damage Awards

OPTIMAL penalties for corporate fraud require that firms face expected penalties equal to the total social costs of the crime. Yet formal courtimposed sanctions for committing fraud often represent a small fraction of the damage produced by the fraud. Alain Sheer and Chih-Chin Ho, for example, estimate that the median and mean ratios of criminal fines to the private loss from private fraud were .14 and .73 in 1988. The corresponding median and mean ratios for government procurement

The Concealed‐Handgun Debate

This paper examines the sizes of the fines, damage awards, remediation costs, and market value losses imposed on companies that violate environmental regulations. Firms that violate environmental laws suffer statistically significant losses in the market value of firm equity. The losses, however, are of similar magnitudes to the legal penalties imposed, and in the cross section, the market value loss is related to the size of the legal penalty. Thus, environmental violations are disciplined largely through legal and regulatory penalties, not through reputational penalties.

Safe Storage Gun Laws: Accidental Deaths, Suicides and Crime

We examine several theoretical and empirical issues concerning punitive damage awards and their importance to business. First, we argue that previous justifications of punitive damage awards ignore the role of private contracting and reputation in assuring contractual performance. In the absence of externalities, punitive awards are not necessary to assure contractual performance even when firms face less than a 100 percent probability of being sued for contractual breach. Next, we examine empirically the sizes, determinants, and valuation impacts of punitive awards assessed against publicly held companies. We find that settlement amounts are low compared to jury awards, and punitive awards are highly variable and difficult to explain using characteristics of the lawsuit or defendant company. Supreme Court and legislative actions affecting punitive awards generally have not had systematic impacts on firm values. Specific punitive lawsuits, however, decrease the values of defendant companies by amounts that exceed settlement or jury verdict amounts, indicating that punitive lawsuits impose reputational costs on defendants.

Guns, Crime, and Safety: Introduction*

Dan A. Black and Daniel S. Nagin state that my article with David Mustard assumes that the effect of concealed-handgun laws is constant over time, that the effect is the same across states, that the article does not control for local time trends, and that we did not investigate whether the results were sensitive to the missing values of the arrest rate. None of these claims are correct, and this is easily verified by anyone who reads the original article. Their statement that the results are sensitive to including Florida applies to fewer than 1 percent of the regressions that I have reported. Using results from previous drafts of Black and Nagins comment as well as new estimates of my own, I provide additional evidence that allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns deters criminals. Violent crime rates were rising before the law was passed and fell thereafter. Copyright 1998 by the University of Chicago.Dan A. Black and Daniel S. Nagin state that my article with David Mustard assumes that the effect of concealed‐handgun laws is constant over time, that the effect is the same across states, that the article does not control for local time trends, and that we did not investigate whether the results were sensitive to the missing values of the arrest rate. None of these claims are correct, and this is easily verified by anyone who reads the original article. Their statement that the results are sensitive to including Florida applies to fewer than 1 percent of the regressions that I have reported. Using results from previous drafts of Black and Nagins comment as well as new estimates of my own, I provide additional evidence that allowing law‐abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns deters criminals. Violent crime rates were rising before the law was passed and fell thereafter.

Re: “What Do We Know A bout the Association Between Firearm Legislation and Firearm-Related Injuries?”

It is frequently assumed that safe‐storage gun laws reduce accidental gun deaths and total suicides, while the possible impact on crime rates is ignored. We find no support that safe‐storage laws reduce either juvenile accidental gun deaths or suicides. Instead, these storage requirements appear to impair people’s ability to use guns defensively. Because accidental shooters also tend to be the ones most likely to violate the new law, safe‐storage laws increase violent and property crimes against law‐abiding citizens with no observable offsetting benefit in terms of reduced accidents or suicides.

Non-voted Ballots, Voter Fatigue, and Race

It seems every newspaper or local or national television news broadcast has stories about guns used in crimes. The costs of guns seem too obvious to ignore. On the other hand, with recent surveys indicating that 46 percent of Americans own a gun and another 5 percent plan to purchasing one, a substantial portion of Americans apparently believe that guns provide significant benefits. While the political debate over gun control has been hotly contested for years, unfortunately, more serious academic research—with large panel data sets and careful attempts to account for a large number of independent variables—has been conducted over only the last half dozen years. The controversial debate involves deterrence versus harm. Arguments and evidence exist on either side. Guns make it easier to kill people (whether by intent or by accident), but they also make it easier for people to defend themselves. The question that concerns everyone is, What is the net effect? The papers in this volume were originally presented at a conference cosponsored by the American Enterprise Institute and the Center for Law, Economics, and Public Policy at Yale Law School during December 1999 and are part of the ongoing process to determine the net effect of guns on people’s health and safety. They fall into three broad categories: (1) the impact of individual gun laws on crime, accidental gun death, or suicide rates; (2) the relationship between private security employment and crime rates; and (3) an extensive and critical examination of earlier work on socalled right-to-carry concealed handgun laws, which set up objective rules that applicants must follow to get a permit to carry. There is a vigorous debate over the relationship between guns and crime, with some pointing to the positive relationship between sales of a gun magazine, Guns & Ammo, and murder rates and others pointing to a negative relationship between survey data on gun ownership and various violent crime rates or the lack of a relationship between the sales of other gun magazinesIT seems every newspaper or local or national television news broadcast has stories about guns used in crimes. The costs of guns seem too obvious to ignore. On the other hand, with recent surveys indicating that 46 percent of Americans own a gun and another 5 percent plan to purchasing one, a substantial portion of Americans apparently believe that guns provide significant benefits.1 While the political debate over gun control has been hotly contested for years, unfortunately, more serious academic research-with large panel data sets and careful attempts to account for a large number of independent variables-has been conducted over only the last half dozen years. The controversial debate involves deterrence versus harm. Arguments and evidence exist on either side. Guns make it easier to kill people (whether by intent or by accident), but they also make it easier for people to defend themselves. The question that concerns everyone is, What is the net effect? The papers in this volume were originally presented at a conference cosponsored by the American Enterprise Institute and the Center for Law, Economics, and Public Policy at Yale Law School during December 1999 and are part of the ongoing process to determine the net effect of guns on peoples health and safety. They fall into three broad categories: (1) the impact of individual gun laws on crime, accidental gun death, or suicide rates; (2) the relationship between private security employment and crime rates; and (3) an extensive and critical examination of earlier work on socalled right-to-carry concealed handgun laws, which set up objective rules that applicants must follow to get a permit to carry. There is a vigorous debate over the relationship between guns and crime, with some pointing to the positive relationship between sales of a gun magazine, Guns & Ammo, and murder rates and others pointing to a negative relationship between survey data on gun ownership and various violent crime rates or the lack of a relationship between the sales of other gun magazines * Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute.

Right-to-Carry Laws and Violent Crime Revisited: Clustering, Measurement Error, and State-by-State Break downs

In their article, Santaella-Tenorio et al. (1) repeated that they provided a summary of results from studies in which researchers investigated at the impact of various gun control laws on crime rates. In legends of their Figures 2–4, they stated that they presented only a single estimate from each study because of space limitations. The Discussion section of their article reads as though the authors were providing a representative result. Instead, from papers that provide hundreds of results, they picked the most extreme result time after time and misreported others. There are 5 problems with the way Santaella-Tenorio et al. created their figures: 1) They consistently picked results that were the most favorable single result for gun control in the papers they surveyed; 2) they picked results that the authors of those papers rejected; 3) they gave equal weight to refereed and nonrefereed papers; 4) they left out papers from their surveys that have results that do not support gun control; and 5) they inaccurately reported some results. The errors here also apply to all the tables in the article by Santaella-Tenorio et al.; however, because of space considerations, we will focus only on some of the errors in their figure about right-to-carry laws (Figure 2 in their original paper (1)). We also feel strongly that our findings in previous works (2–6) have been misreported. In the articles by Plassmann and Whitley (2) and Plassmann and Tideman (7), the authors argued that weighted … Language: en