Firearms costs, firearms benefits and the limits of knowledge.

• Author: Polsby, Daniel D.
• Position: Guns and Violence Symposium

America's intensifying dismay about violent crime has become so pervasive that one may well affirm that there is something of a "national crime crisis." Yet there is something of a puzzle as well. Overall crime rates in the United States have been falling for nearly twenty years. Violent crime, declining on a national basis for the last three years, has not changed dramatically since 1980, especially in comparison to the starling run-up in serious crime that coincided with the maturation of the post-war birth cohort. The homicide rate has fluctuated to some extent, but despite recent increases it is still below the levels of die late 1970s and indeed, below the rates recorded though most of the 1920s.

To some extent the growth of public apprehension concerning violent crime can be explained by its cumulative nature: "[w]e experience the crime wave not as separate moments in time but as one long descending night."(1) When serious crime touches oneself or one's family, it is an event thai is more or less present throughout one's life. The direction of crime rates should be less important, therefore, than changes in the number of people whose lives have been touched by crime. This number may constantly increase through a generation or more though the crime rate falls. It should be obvious, however, that cumulative enlargement of the circle of people who have been victimized by crime can be at best an incomplete explanation for the change in public attitude that is taking place. Public attitudes about crime have changed much more rapidly than the size of its population of victims. "The crime crisis" is a crisis of confidence in the ability of the public sector to address the crime problem constructively. As such it is very much a part of the tide of skepticism about the role of government that has been an expanding feature of partisan political discourse in recent years. Liberalized carry concealed laws are essentially a response to intensifying doubt about the capacity of government--the police, the courts, and the corrections system--to deliver adequate levels of public or personal security. Serious questions remain, however, concerning the ability of private sector practices to deliver the goods where the public sector has failed.

Because the techniques of social science are clumsy, the information generated is often nebulous and hard to interpret. Seldom do social researchers have the luxury enjoyed by Rutherford or Michaelson, of performing a crucial experiment and then proclaiming that a definite increment in human understanding has been attained. Social scientists must sort through literatures filled with hints and intimations in order to get an idea of what is definitely known, and even then gains in knowledge are most often of the null variety, as we fail to find good evidence to support a hypothesis. The problem is ingrained in firearms research, because few if any criminologists believe that guns are the sole factor promoting anti-social behavior. It is not guns themselves, but guns plus additional variables, that lead to trouble. Getting much beyond that generality has been frustrating, and has often seemed something akin to biologists investigating microbes with binoculars. Firearms effects on crime rates--what good do guns do and what harm do they do--seem to be at most quite marginal, and of course available investigative techniques are of seriously limited power. Still, the game is worth the candle if undertaken with proper circumspection, for though accessions to knowledge from any given study may be small, the matter ultimately under scrutiny, that of personal and collective security, is of perennial concern.

In recent years a number of states, including Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Mississippi, Montana, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming, have relaxed their laws regulating civilians' carrying of concealed firearms, thus joining Connecticut, Indiana, Vermont, and Washington in adopting regimes significantly more permissive than those typical in the rest of the country. A number of other states currently have similar modifications under consideration. The two questions that these amendments beg--and indeed that they may eventually help to answer--are: (1) whether widely permitted civilian handgun carriage risks turning every argument between strangers into a wild west shoot-'em-up, or, conversely; (2) whether increasing the prevalence of concealed handguns drives the crime rate down. These are the questions David McDowall, Colin Loftin, and Brian Wiersema seek to measure with interrupted time series analysis, looking at the experience in the largest urban areas of Florida (Miami, Jacksonville, and Tampa), Mississippi (Jackson) and Oregon (Portland). What they found was statistically significant enlargements in firearms homicides in three of the five cities and insignificant changes in Portland and Miami.

In order properly to evaluate the findings of studies like this one, it is useful to bear in mind the theoretical reasons that might be adduced either to believe or to doubt whether liberalizing civilian access to firearms actually will enhance either the general security of the public or (what is a distinct question) the private security of the person who arms himself. The argument in favor of liberalized gun laws would point to their usefulness as a means of deterring attackers. There is no a priori reason to believe that firearms should be any less useful to civilians, at least those properly trained to use them, than to police officers. Open carrying of a side arm tends to create a private security good (i.e., by "hardening" a particular target), whereas concealed carrying, if it is believed to be reasonably widespread, should tend to create a public security good because it will not be evident to a predator which potential victims or bystanders might have the means to resist attack.

There are also theoretical reasons for skepticism. One is that if an argument blows up between two people, resort to a handgun would confer what is sometimes called a "first mover" advantage. Hostile confrontations between latent antagonists, each of whom estimates that the other is (with some probability) armed, may catastrophically degenerate into gunplay as each recognizes the advantage of beating the other to the draw and the detriment of being beaten. Environments in which "first movers" possess a strategic edge--what in international arms reductions talks would be called a "first strike capability," are well understood to be intrinsically unstable.(2) Another theoretical reason that points in the same direction was suggested separately by Frank Zimring(3) and Philip Cook(4), who explained why higher levels of civilian armaments (what is called in jargon "gun density") would be associated with higher levels of homicide. This theory is based on the observation that many homicidal assaults are not accompanied by a specific intention to kill but rather are mercurial outbursts whose lethality will depend on the virulence of the weapons at hand. Guns are much more lethal, wound for wound, than other weapons.(5) When the ratio of firearms to non-firearms weapons increases, one should expect to see increases in the rate of homicide, and conversely, holding all else constant.

McDowall, Loftin, and Wiersema do not actually test the Zimring-Cook hypothesis, because their study focuses on the relationship between the liberalization of early concealed weapons laws and, not murder rates, but firearms murder rates. Hence, their study does not measure the size of the margin in which homicidally tending persons will substitute non-firearms weapons when firearms become more difficult to get. But it does reach conclusions consistent with those in a number of studies over the past decade that find connections between firearms laws and rates of homicide and suicide. The most widely publicized contributions have appeared in die New England Journal of Medicine, authored by John Sloan and collaborators,(6) Arthur Kellermann and collaborators,(7) and Loftin, McDowall, and Wiersema themselves.(8) Taken together, these papers have affected to establish not only that restricting civilian access to firearms saves lives...