Michael Konczal over at The Nation has the very interesting article highlighting a new study on gun violence, gun laws, and the increase in guns in general.
In 1997, researchers John Lott and David Mustard asserted that more guns meant less crime; it was an influential argument that likely contributed to states passing right-to-carry laws. Ever since, there’s been a debate over the effects of this legislation on violent crime.
But with an updated paper by legal scholars John Donohue and Abhay Aneja and economist Kyle Weber, there’s a new consensus: Right-to-carry laws actually increase the rate of violent crime. Ten years after a state passes a right-to-carry law, violent crime—which includes murder, manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault—will be 13 to 15 percent higher than if the state had done nothing.
Konczal explains that a big part of why this new study is so much more convincing than previous ones is how much more data and how much larger the sample size is. A big part of the hold-up on better data sources has been the NRA-funded politicians unwilling to even allow the study of guns and gun violence in our country over the past few decades. The harsh facts are that the NRA has known for a very long time that guns do kill people, and the more guns there are, the more people die from guns. But what about good guys with guns, scaring away bad guys with guns?
The report also found that a right to carry has no deterrent effect on property crimes. (Indeed, in some of the calculations, such crimes increased.) This lack of deterrence isn’t surprising, given that victims of violent crimes fail to defend themselves with a gun 99.2 percent of the time. Using reasonable estimates of the relationship between incarceration and crime—that for every 10 percent increase in incarceration, there’s a 1.5 percent decrease in crime—the researchers estimate that the average right-to-carry state would have to double its prison population to counter the effects of this legislation.
There are a few reasons that the numbers rise, not the least of which is that there is a 1 percent-per-year rate of stolen guns—more people with guns means more people having their guns stolen. More and more of these studies will be coming down the road, and they will likely say similar things about the proliferation of guns and lax gun laws and the connection to gun violence. Occasionally there will be some NRA-funded “think tank” study that shows how restrictive gun-laws lead to higher abortion rates and more immigrants stealing your jobs—but we will all know the truth.