On Mon, Dec 15, 2003 at 01:35:00PM -0500, Eugene Volokh
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Guns, Drugs, and CrimeI haven't read this, but I thought that list members
> might find it interesting.
>
> If you do get a chance to read it, and have some thoughts on the methodology
> or the results, those should, I think, be much worth sharing with the list.
> (I suspect that it would be hard to say anything helpful about the piece
> until one reads it closely, which is why I have nothing to say.)
Just from reading the summary, a couple things leap out -- the
sort of basic flaws anyone who has taken a few statistics courses
should be able to spot instantly in a proposed study, and either
deal with in their analysis or redesign the study to avoid the
problems.
I will peruse the whole thing later, and offer further comments
if warranted. It is possible the authors dealt with some or all
of these problems in their analysis... but I suspect they do not.
"No support is found for the hypothesis that gun availability
decreases the likelihood of being victimized": this should not
surprise anyone, since they are working with a sample of
high-school students for whom "having access to a gun at home"
does not indicate that the gun is available for self-defense,
whether inside or outside the home.
"In fact, the results show that having access to guns increases
the probability of being cut or stabbed by someone and of someone
pulling a knife or gun on the juvenile.": Again, this should not
be surprising; juveniles in high-crime areas are probably highly
correlated with juveniles in economically-depressed familys or
regions. Families in high-crime areas are presumably more likely
to have a gun around the house for self-defense and definitely
more likely to store the gun in such a manner that it is readily
accessible to a juvenile (as the cost of a secure gun safe is
not trivial). Families composed of criminals owning illegal
firearms are even more highly correlated with lack of safe
storage methods and gun availability.
"gun availability at home increases the propensity to commit
crime by about two percentage points for juveniles but has no
impact on damaging property.": It's unclear what crimes they
refer to or why they chose to exclude damaging property.
Regardless, this is another unsurprising result: *Access* to
firearms is likely to be highly correlated with living in a
high-crime area and with being raised by criminals. Being raised
by criminals will presumably have a fairly obvious
crime-increasing effect on the juveniles so raised.
Why do I emphasize access? Because having a gun at home for most
juveniles is not the same as either owning a gun or being able to
use the gun. The juvenile cannot legally carry the gun, and will
as a practical matter be prevented from doing so by the owner,
regardless of the juvenile's perceived "access". There is also
the possibility that a juvenile who has "access" to a gun at home
has that access because he himself owns (illegally) that gun, and
uses it in criminal enterprise.
Additionally, in most cases, being "victimized" occurs whether or
not you have a gun to protect you. If you are accosted by a
criminal in a dark alley demanding your wallet (or your lunch
money), you have been victimized, whether you use or display a
firearm in self-defense or not. To properly analyze the
benefits of gun ownership, an unbiased scientist cannot seek to
use juvenile data and must distinguish between 1) events
occurring inside or outside the home; 2) whether the victim had
access to the firearm; 3) whether the firearm was legal or
illegal.
Why must "illegal" guns (ie, guns possessed by prohibited
persons, such as felons, as distinct from "banned guns" eg
assault weapons) be distinguished? Because those illegal guns
are highly correlated with a criminal upbringing, unsafe storage
methods, and high-crime areas.
Failing to distinguish those factors will produce misleading
results, as the people reading academic analyses of gun control
and crime issues are presumably highly negatively correlated
with illegal guns.
It's also interesting, given the expected dichotomy between
illegal and legal guns, to question whether prohibitive gun
control measures (ie, a ban on all firearms, or on handguns)
would effectively turn "legal" guns into "illegal" guns; that is,
once the gun is made illegal, do the negative traits correlated
with (but not, I think, caused by!) the "availability" of those
firearms become associated with the guns newly made illegal?
The hypothesized causes of the effect in that case are a criminal
upbringing, unsafe storage methods, and a high-crime environment.
By living in a house with an illegal firearm, even one in which
the owners were otherwise perfectly responsible, could produce
similar effects: a firearm concealed from the police is not
stored in a gun safe; and a parent who commits a crime and
conceals it from the police with the knowledge of his children
is, to some degree, damaging their respect for the law.
Thus, we can speculate that banning firearms might actually have
negative results. But there is as yet no evidence to back that
up -- just a chain of interesting hypotheticals.
Since this ended up being a lot longer than I expected, I'm
posting this response on my weblog:
http://www.triggerfinger.org/weblog/entry/4499.jsp
--
Matthew Hunter ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Public Key: http://matthew.infodancer.org/public_key.txt
Homepage: http://matthew.infodancer.org/index.jsp
Politics: http://www.triggerfinger.org/index.jsp
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