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Gun Control’s Effect on Violence, Part II

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Originally posted November 2, 2016.

Last week I introduced you to a piece by Robert Verbruggen explaining the flaw in a study of violence involving firearms by the Center for American Progress (a liberal progressive think tank). Verbruggen continued his exploration of research involving guns and crime here. In his second piece he addresses an academic paper written by Gary Kleck, Tomislav Kovandzic, and Jon Bellows.

Of the three studies I’ll be looking at in this series, this is arguably the most complicated. Instead of looking at the 50 states, it looks at every city in America with a population of 25,000 or more—1,078 in all. Instead of collapsing all gun-control laws onto a single scale, it separately measures the effects of 19 specific laws. And instead of just comparing raw crime rates, the authors build elaborate models that account for demographic and cultural differences between the cities, and that also include gun ownership so we can be sure the results stem from the laws themselves, rather than just reflecting the fact that states with strong gun cultures tend to have less gun control.

The key findings:

  • As Kleck and co-authors have found in other studies as well, gun ownership by itself does not cause higher crime rates. This finding relies on some arcane statistics, unfortunately—the authors measure gun ownership through a “proxy” (the percentage of suicides committed with guns), and in addition employ a technique called “instrumental variables” to separate correlation from causation.
  • Most gun-control laws don’t work. There’s even some (weak) evidence that a few of them increase crime.
  • A couple laws do seem to reduce crime, however—most notably, requiring a license to possess a gun, a measure strongly opposed by gun-rights groups. The authors note that such laws entail background checks on prospective gun owners.

All of that squares with my own prior views, so I’m tempted to just agree with the study and leave it at that. But in my first post I promised nitpicking, and I shall deliver. Fortunately, nitpicking this study is easy to do, because the authors themselves are very thorough in explaining its limitations.

If this is the most complicated study we’ll be looking at this week, it’s also the ugly duckling in some ways. Perhaps the oddest thing about it is that it relies on data more than a quarter-century old, from 1990. The authors do this because good suicide data (which they used to estimate gun ownership) are not available at the city level in more recent years.

A lot has changed since 1990, though; crime has plummeted, and we’ve seen developments in federal law (such as the requirement for all licensed gun dealers to perform background checks and the creation of a system for performing those checks). It’s hard to say for sure how well the findings translate to the 2016 context. And by using a single year of data, the authors miss an opportunity to compare crime rates before and after the laws at issue went into effect, though in one of their models they do control for the 1980 crime rates of these cities, a somewhat similar idea.

FLASHBACK VIDEO: Robert VerBruggen from National Review Online on His Article: ‘The NRA’s Dark Vision’?

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E.J. Smith - Your Survival Guy

Preparing your investments and family for when disaster strikes.
E.J. Smith is the Founder of YourSurvivalGuy.com, Managing Director at Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd., a Managing Editor of Richardcyoung.com, and Editor-in-Chief of Youngresearch.com. E.J. graduated from Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, with a B.S. in finance and investments. In 1995, E.J. began his investment career at Fidelity Investments in Boston before joining Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd. in 1998. E.J. has trained at Sig Sauer Academy in Epping, NH, where he completed course-work in Practical and Defensive Handgun, Conceal Carry Pistol, Shotguns, Precision Scope Rifle and Kidnapping Prevention. E.J. plays a Yamaha Recording Custom drum set with Zilldjian cymbals. His first drum set was a 5-piece Slingerland with Zilldjians. He grew-up worshiping Neil Peart of the band Rush, and loves the song Tom Sawyer—the name of his family’s boat, a Grady-White Canyon 306. He grew up in Mattapoisett, MA, an idyllic small town on the water near Cape Cod. He spends time in Newport, RI and Bartlett, NH—both as far away from Wall Street as one could mentally get. The Newport office is on a quiet, tree lined street not far from the harbor and the log cabin in Bartlett, NH, the “Live Free or Die” state, sits on the edge of the White Mountain National Forest. He enjoys spending time in Key West and Paris. Please get in touch with E.J. at ejsmith@youngresearch.com. Sign up here to receive all the best content from Richardcyoung.com each week.