The media over the last couple of days has been pointing to a revised paper by Abhay Aneja, John J. Donohue III, and Alexandria Zhang that has been floating around in various forms since at least 2009. Their earlier paper claimed that right-to-carry laws and no impact on murder, rape and robber. While much the earlier versions of the paper remained unchanged, the authors add a few more years of data for some of their estimates. Some of the changed estimates are done only using later years and not the whole sample. On Friday, Christopher Ingraham in the Washington Post felt this unpublished “new research debunks a central thesis of the gun rights movement” of “More Guns, Less Crime” (see also discussions in the Huffington Post, the Raw Story, and other newspapers around the country that picked up the claim).

There are many errors in Ingraham’s article. For example, “Stanford law professor John Donohue and his colleagues have added another full decade to the analysis.” Yet, the third edition of “More Guns, Less Crime” has data from 1977 to 2005. Moody, Marvell, Zimmerman, and Alemante have a new paper earlier this year that looked at data from 1977 to 2006. Gius (2014) looked at data up through 2009. Zimmerman (2014) looks at crime data up through 2010. And note that none of those papers agree with Aneja, Donohue, and Zhang’s conclusion. Previously even in the Washington Post, Emily Badger’s misleading column also discussed an earlier version of Donohue’s paper with data through 2006 (7/29).

1) The problem with using the 1999 to 2010 period of time is discussed extensively in this short paper available here (download recommended). The abstract reads as follows: “Unfortunately, many who have examined the impact of so-called “shall-issue” or “right-to-carry” laws assume that the adoption of such laws causes a large, immediate increase in the number of permits. But that is often not the case, for states differ widely as to how easily permits can be obtained. This problem is particularly problematic for studies that have looked at the period after 2000 because the last states to adopt right-to-carry laws had relatively restrictive laws in terms of fees and training requirements. These restrictions reduce the number of people who obtain concealed handgun permits. In fact, the share of the adult population with permits increased less during the 1999-2010 period in the states that adopted right-to-carry laws during that period than the states that they are being compared against.” The point of looking at the change in the number of permits and not just the change in the laws has been made since the 2000 edition of “More Guns, Less Crime.”

2) Take a big claim in the Aneja, Donohue, and Zhang paper:

If we estimate both the dummy and spline models using our preferred specification without state trends for each of these two time periods (overall or after 1999), then we have 4 estimates of the impact of RTC laws for each of seven crime categories (Tables 8a and 11a). In each of the seven crime categories, at least one of these four estimates suggests that RTC laws increase crime at the .10 level of significance, with murder, rape, and larceny estimates reaching significance at the .05 level. These crime increases are substantial, with the dummy variable model for the complete period (Table 8a) suggesting that RTC laws increased every crime category by at least 8 percent, except murder (in that model, murder rose 3 percent but it is not statistically significant). For the post- 1999 regressions, spline estimate (Table 11a) suggests that RTC laws increased the rate of murder by 1.5 percentage points each year (significant at the .05 level). In none of those 28 regressions was there any statistically significant estimate suggesting that RTC laws decreased crime.

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concealed carry, CPRC original research, John Donohue, Response to critics

By johnrlott

