COLD COMFORT.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob
• Position: Economist John Lott on gun control - Interview

Economist John Lott discusses the benefits of guns--and the hazards of pointing them out.

Until recently, when he bought a 9-mm Ruger after his own research impressed upon him the value of gun ownership, John Lott had no personal experience with firearms, aside from one day of riflery in summer camp when he was 12. That fact did not stop a reviewer of Lott's 1998 book, More Guns, Less Crime (University of Chicago Press), from labeling him a "gun nut." Writing in The American Prospect, Edward Cohn also identified Lott as "a leading loon of the Chicago School of economics, known for its ultra-market ideology." But that was gentle--a backhanded compliment, even--compared to the attacks from anti-gun activists, who accused Lott of producing his landmark study at the behest of the gun industry.

Lott, now a senior research scholar at Yale Law School, used to be the John M. Olin Law and Economics Fellow at the University of Chicago. That position, like similar ones at other major universities, was endowed by a foundation based on the personal fortune of the late John M. Olin, former chairman of the Olin Corporation. Among many other things, the Olin Corporation makes Winchester ammunition. These facts led Kristen Rand of the Violence Policy Center to conclude that "Lott's work was, in essence, funded by the firearms industry" -- a charge that was echoed by other gun control advocates, including Charles Schumer, then a Democratic representative from New York and now a senator.

Never mind that assuming the Olin Foundation takes orders from "the firearms industry" is like assuming the Ford Foundation does the bidding of automakers. Never mind that Olin fellows are chosen by faculty committees, not by the foundation (with which Lott never had any contact). Proponents of gun control were desperate to discredit Lott, because his findings contradicted their dark predictions about what would happen if states allowed law-abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns.

Analyzing 18 years of data for more than 3,000 counties, Lott found that violent crime drops significantly when states switch from discretionary permit policies, which give local officials the authority to determine who may carry a gun, to "shall issue" or "right-to-carry" laws, which require that permits be granted to everyone who meets certain objective criteria. That conclusion, first set forth in a 1997 paper that Lott co-authored with David Mustard, now an economist at the University of Georgia, heartened defenders of gun ownership and dismayed their opponents. Arguing that "shall issue" laws are beneficial, while other gun laws are ineffective at best, Lott quickly became one of the most widely cited--and reviled--scholars in the gun control debate.

Though it was the gun issue that brought Lott notoriety, it hasn't been the focus of his career. The 41-year-old economist, who earned his Ph.D. at UCLA, has published papers on a wide variety of topics, including professional licensing, criminal punishment, campaign finance, and public education. Last summer he published Are Predatory Commitments Credible? (University of Chicago Press), a skeptical look at theories of predatory pricing, and he is working on a book about the reputational penalties faced by criminals, a longstanding interest. In addition to his positions at Yale and the University of Chicago, Lott has served as chief economist at the U.S. Sentencing Commission and taught at UCLA and the University of Pennsylvania, among other schools. He lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, with his wife and four children. Senior Editor Jacob Sullum and Washington Editor Michael Lynch talked to Lott at his Yale Law School office in mid-October.

Reason: How did you become interested in guns?

John R. Lott Jr.: About six years ago, I was teaching a class dealing with crime issues at the University of Pennsylvania, and it dawned on me that my students would be interested in some papers on gun control. It forced me to look at the literature systematically to decide what papers to assign to the class. I was shocked by how poorly done the existing research on guns and crime was.

You had very small samples. By far the largest previous study on guns and crime had looked at just 170 cities within a single year, 1980. Most of the rest looked at, say, 24 counties or 24 cities within a single year. No one had tried to account for things like arrest rates or conviction rates or prison sentence lengths. And the studies were all very limited in the sense that they were purely cross-sectional, where you look at the crime rates across jurisdictions in one year, or [purely longitudinal], where you pick one city or one county and look at it over time.

It was basically because of that class that I saw the benefit to going out and trying to do it right. So I put together what I think is by far the largest study that's ever been done on crime. The book has data on all 3,000-plus counties in the U.S. over an 18-year period. And simply having that large a data set allows you to account for hundreds of factors, thousands of factors, that you couldn't have accounted for in those smaller data sets.

Reason: What has been the most gratifying response to the book? Do you know of any criminologists whose views have been changed by your research?

Lott: Some well-known people like [University of Pennsylvania criminologist] John DiIulio and [UCLA political scientist] James Q. Wilson have said very nice things about the study. I think it's caused DiIulio to look at these issues differently, and there are other criminologists I know of who have been amazed by how strong the data are. I've done lots of empirical studies, and the regularities that you see here, in terms of the drops in violent crimes right after these laws go into effect, are very dramatic.

The intensity of the issue on both sides is something I wouldn't have expected before I got into it. I've been involved in a lot of debates, and people tell me, "You should have anticipated this before you did the study." But I've written about 80 academic...