Transcript prepared by the Clerk of the Legislature, Transcriber's Office
February 6, 1997
Pages 40-52
JOHN LOTT: My name is John Lott. I'm a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, and I'd like to thank you for letting me talk here today. My ears are still unplugging from the plane trip, too. I believe that a lot of people on both sides of the debate are ultimately concerned about the same question: Will these concealed handgun laws save lives or will they cost lives? What will they do to the number of rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults that threaten people every day? I'm here today to talk about a study that I recently completed last year that's forth coming in the Journal of Legal Studies, has just come out in January (Exhibit 10). There are basically two types of questions here. One, will allowing citizens to carry concealed handguns increase the incidence at which law-abiding citizens harm each other? Or will the threat of citizens carrying weapons primarily deter criminals? There are two types of theories. One is a notion of accidental deaths or deaths arising from moments of anger. This is probably best summarized by the statement that if you introduce a gun into a violent encounter it increases the chance that someone will die. On the other hand, there's this notion of defensive uses of guns. There are surveys that have been done by the Los Angeles Times, Gallup, Roper, Peter Hart, about 15 national survey organizations in total that range from anything from 760,000 times a year to 3.6 million times a year people use guns defensively. About 98 percent of those simply involve people brandishing a gun and not using them. My belief is that both of these types of stories are very important and both happen. That when you allow law-abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns you're going to see times where people are going to use them improperly, but you're also going to see times when people are going to be able to defend themselves against what would otherwise be horrible instances. What my study tried to do is try to get an idea of what the net effect of those things were. whether on the average you'd be saving lives or losing lives as a result of this legislation. There is some things that...some pieces of information that one can get at before I go through the numbers in my study. First, when dealing with improper uses of guns, we had some discussion of that from Senator Chambers already. There are some numbers for states that have collected incidences of which concealed handgun permits have been improperly used. In Florida. they've issued about 300,000 permits between October 1, 1987 and December 31, 1995. Five of those permitted handguns were used in violent crimes and there were no fatalities. Multnomah County, Oregon, has issued about 11,100 permits over a period of time from January 1990 to October 1994, 2 shootings which were considered unjustified occurred. Obviously, for those two situations, obviously two is probably too much. But it gives you some idea of the magnitude of improper uses that one would be talking about. The one thing that's come up here already are moments of rage that could occur. And if one reads the legislative history, in other places traffic accidents, as Senator Chambers mentioned, is one very frequent example that people bring up. We've searched over the histories for these 31 states that have these concealed handgun laws. Some of them have had them for many decades. There is only one case that we were able to find where permitted concealed handgun was used in a shooting after a traffic accident. That in fact occurred earlier this year in Texas where two drivers of pickup trucks sideswiped each other and one of the drivers used the gun defensively after he was being attacked by the other driver. Given the limited time here, I'll just try to briefly summarize some of the key points that we found in the study. Our study represents the first systematic attempt to look at national evidence on the effect of gun control generally. We looked at data from all 3,054 counties in the United States by year over a 16-year period of time from 1977 through 1992. We looked at crimes for murder, robbery, rape, aggravated assault, and different types of property crimes. We controlled for the first time in any gun control study changes in arrest rates, changes in conviction rates, changes in prison term lengths, we controlled for the most comprehensive set of demographic variables that have been controlled for in any previous study on crime. We controlled for many other variables I'd be happy to go into. Essentially after accounting for these, the most conservative estimates are that when a state adopts these so-called nondiscretionary concealed handgun laws, they see a drop in murder rates of at least 8 percent, aggravated assaults fall by at least 7 percent, rapes decline by at least 5 percent, and you see a 3 percent drop in robberies. There is some evidence of increases in property crimes, a couple percent increase in both larcenies and also in auto thefts. I'd be happy to go into what I think the reasons are behind those relative changes. A couple of other interesting things that we found were that the biggest drops in violent crimes occurred in the most urban, most crime prone areas. While the average drop in murder rates was at least 8 percent, if one were to look at counties, just those counties with over 200,000 in population, you'd find that the average drop in murder rates was about 13 percent. We also found that there are differential effects from additional women versus additional men carrying concealed handguns. While allowing additional women to carry concealed handguns or men lowered murder rates, the effect was much more pronounced for women. For an additional woman carrying concealed handgun, the murder rates for women falls by about three to four times the drop in murder rates that you observe from men from additional man carrying a concealed handgun. We looked at other questions such as the changes in the number of accidental handgun deaths and suicides that might result as a result of changes in these types of laws and we were not able to find any statistically significant changes that occurred. I guess this means my time is up but I'd be happy to go through general discussions about any of the aspects of the study. (See also Exhibit 8).
SENATOR BRASHEAR: Thank you. Professor. Questions for Professor Lott? Senator Hilgert.
SENATOR HILGERT: Professor, forgive me if I didn't catch this earlier, what exactly are you a professor of?
JOHN LOTT: I'm a professor in the law school at the University of Chicago Law School.
SENATOR HILGERT: And you're here representing just yourself?
JOHN LOTT: Yeah, I was...
SENATOR HILGERT: The University of Chicago Law...
JOHN LOTT: I'm not representing the University of Chicago and I'm not really representing this bill. What I'm here I believe is as somebody who studied this area and...
SENATOR HILGERT: How did you come to know about Nebraska's bill? I mean it's just kind of interesting that someone from the University of Chicago happened to be before us today.
JOHN LOTT: I got a call from Senator Schellpeper's office last week...
SENATOR HILGERT: Okay, so you were asked...
JOHN LOTT: ...asking if I would be willing to come down here. This is the first time I've testified in any type of situation like this, but he seemed to think that it would be useful for me to do it and so I'm here.
SENATOR HILGERT: Well, thank you for coming down.
JOHN LOTT: Sure.
SENATOR BRASHEAR: Senator Pedersen.
SENATOR Dw. PEDERSEN: Professor Lott, do you have any numbers at all with all the numbers you just rattled off of the possibility of what percentage of violent crimes we may go down with the adoption of this kind of bill in the state of Nebraska?
JOHN LOTT: No, I haven't broken it out for Nebraska specifically. It would be possible to do that, but I haven't done that.
SENATOR Dw. PEDERSEN: What has it been in general just all of the violent crimes? Have you got...
JOHN LOTT: Well. total violent crimes fall by about 6 percent.
SENATOR Dw. PEDERSEN: And it's all violent crimes together.
JOHN LOTT: But that's all of them. You know, you have about this 8 percent drop in murders, 7 percent drop in aggravated assaults, 5 percent drop in rapes, and about 3 percent drop in robberies.
SENATOR Dw. PEDERSEN: Adding them all together comes up with...
JOHN LOTT: Right, right. Obviously murders and rapes are a relatively small percentage of the total number of violent crimes.
SENATOR Dw. PEDERSEN: In your studies, has there been anything about nonviolent crimes then going up?
JOHN LOTT: Yeah, one thing we consistently found were in all the specifications that we looked at were a drop in violent crimes. We found some evidence that wasn't as consistent of increase in property crimes. What appears to be happening is that when these laws pass, criminals move out of those crimes where they come into direct contact with a victim such as robbery where there could be an impact from potential victims carrying concealed handguns to make it more difficult for these criminals to commit these crimes into crimes like larceny which obviously Involve crimes of stealth so, for instance, that would be theft of a tape deck from an unattended car or theft from a coin operated vending machine or things like auto theft where again there's also very little contact between the victim and the criminal. So they seem to be responding. We see some criminals seem to leave the criminal market completely and some seem to switch and do those crimes where they don't come into direct confrontations with victims.
SENATOR Dw. PEDERSEN: Thank you.
JOHN LOTT: Sure.
SENATOR BRASHEAR: Senator Hudkins.
SENATOR HUDKINS: Senator Pedersen asked the same question I was going to, thank you.
SENATOR BRASHEAR: Senator Jones.
SENATOR JONES; Yes, Professor, what in states that you've checked in. the ladies and the men is there a lot more 'ladies that applied for the application to carry a gun concealed?
JOHN LOTT: No. In fact. usually about 20 to 25 percent of the applications tend to be women. That's been increasing over time. If you were to look at numbers from the early eighties, you would have seen something like around 14 to 15 percent and it's been going up in the last decade.
SENATOR JONES: Thank you.
SENATOR BRASHEAR: Professor Lott. is your study available in printed form?
JOHN LOTT: Yeah, I mean I can give you the Journal of Legal Studies, the January issue I guess got delayed, but it should be out this week. I have a copy of the galleys that I'm happy to give somebody if they're interested in it.
SENATOR BRASHEAR: Would you, please.
JOHN LOTT: I'd be happy to do that.
SENATOR BRASHEAR: We'll make that part of the record. Further questions? Senator Chambers.
SENATOR CHAMBERS: Mr. Chairman, I wanted since I had asked questions earlier to give everybody else a chance and it might cut down on some of those that I would asked. Professor, is your last name Locke, L-o-c-k-e or...
JOHN LOTT: Not that famous of a name.
SENATOR CHAMBERS: Oh, but is it Locke?
JOHN LOTT: But it's just Lott, L-o-t-t.
SENATOR CHAMBERS: Oh. okay. I hadn't picked up, thank you. Who commissioned the study that you undertook?
JOHN LOTT: I did.
SENATOR CHAMBERS: Oh. Are you a statistician?
JOHN LOTT: I'm an economist by training. I have a Ph.D. in economics. I've also served as chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission in Washington, D.C., during 1988-89. So I've been involved in empirical research on crime for many years. I've taught crime type classes at the University of Pennsylvania, at UCLA, at Stanford.
SENATOR CHAMBERS: When you taught those, did you teach thieves, burglars, robbers, or which? No, it was just the way you phrased it, it was the way you phrased it.
JOHN LOTT: I don't think any of my students became thieves, burglars, or robbers as a result of a class that I know of, but. . .
SENATOR CHAMBERS: But are you a statistician?
JOHN LOTT: Yeah, I do econometrics.
SENATOR CHAMBERS: Okay. Now when you...
JOHN LOTT: And I've taught statistics also.
SENATOR CHAMBERS: When you undertook, well, I won't have an exchange with you about what George Bernard Shaw said about teachers. But nobody commissioned the study. You decided that was something you would like to do and so you then did it.
JOHN LOTT: Right. Well, maybe I should talk about that briefly.
SENATOR CHAMBERS: No, no, that's all. I just want to be clear on that.
JOHN LOTT: Right, well...
SENATOR CHAMBERS: It wasn't commissioned by any organization or by the university but something you...okay. now I'm clear on it.
JOHN LOTT: Right, basically three years ago I was teaching a class that was dealing with issues of crime and I thought it would be interesting to go and give my students some papers on gun control.
SENATOR CHAMBERS: Um-hum.
JOHN LOTT: And I started looking at the papers and I realized how poorly done they are. There may be about a couple hundred papers on gun control but basically fall into two types of categories, either what we would call purely time series data so they pick like one county or one city or one state and look at it over 16 or 20 years and basically just compare what the mean murder rate was before and after a change in the law. Or another type of study would be purely cross-sectional so they take one year and maybe look across 20 counties or 24 cities or something like that in one year just to see how crime rates vary across it.
SENATOR CHAMBERS: Okay. but you don't have to tell me all that to answer mine because somebody else may want to ask and I'm trying to get through so that as many as possible can testify without too much time passing. Now a lot of people mention homicides, but as you point out, homicides and rape would constitute a relatively small percentage of this overall crime rate that you're talking about.
JOHN LOTT: Important but small.
SENATOR CHAMBERS: But here's what I want to ask you. When you were studying homicides, what was, if there was any instrumentality that was more used than any other, was there one that was used more often than any other one?
JOHN LOTT: You mean instrumentality in terms of committing the murder?
SENATOR CHAMBERS: Yeah, committing the...
JOHN LOTT: Yeah, well guns obviously are used at the highest rate.
SENATOR CHAMBERS: Okay, now in your study, and you don't have to do too much, we both know this. The vast majority of homicides are committed against family members or friends or acquaintances.
JOHN LOTT: Yeah. I think you need to be a little bit careful of that. There's about 19 percent of murders are created...committed against family members. You have another 40 percent that are committed against people who know the murderer.
SENATOR CHAMBERS: Right.
JOHN LOTT: But you have to be a little careful with that because I think it's a little bit of a misnomer. Because when they put that together, for example, rival gangs know each other and in many urban areas the large majority of murderers obviously involve gang members, particularly in types of drug trades.
SENATOR CHAMBERS: But, Doctor, as...the crime that's most easily solvable that's serious is murder because of the fact that it's not that difficult to determine who the perpetrator is. Sometimes it's hard to catch the perpetrator. The most difficult one to solve is when strangers commit the homicide. But here's what I want to ask you.
JOHN LOTT: Well, but that's not quite true. I mean even when you have...
SENATOR CHAMBERS: Okay, well, it's not quite true. I'll buy that. Okay. You read what you read, I've read what I've read. You believe what you've read, I believe what I've read and some of what I'm saying I could document with studies from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies which you probably would reject. But I don't want to quarrel with you on that.
JOHN LOTT: No, I'm just...
SENATOR CHAMBERS: I'm trying to get to a point. When you were doing your study, did you develop any statistics about the number of people who had their weapon taken from them?
JOHN LOTT: No, there's no numbers on that. The FBI...
SENATOR CHAMBERS: Why not?
JOHN LOTT: Because the FBI doesn't collect that type of data.
SENATOR CHAMBERS: But that could be something that happens frequently, isn't it?
JOHN LOTT: Yeah, it's possible it could. I'm sure it does happen.
SENATOR CHAMBERS: And maybe it doesn't happen, okay. So this could be a situation where people would obtain a gun from somebody legally carrying it who might not have otherwise obtained one.
JOHN LOTT: I'm sure that happens.
SENATOR CHAMBERS: And since we don't have figures, I won't ask you to discuss that any further.
JOHN LOTT: No, but I'd be happy to because basically even though you can't...
SENATOR CHAMBERS: But if we don't have the...
JOHN LOTT: ...even though you can't measure how many of those happen, the basic question you can still ask is is the net effect of these laws to increase...
SENATOR CHAMBERS: But that's not what I'm asking.
JOHN LOTT: Well, all right.
SENATOR CHAMBERS: Sometimes when you try to read a mind you make a mistake. There are some of these points which people who conduct studies will not touch on but they have a bearing on the wisdom of adopting a policy such as making more guns available to those who might want to get them illegally. Now you talked about the reduction in these crimes. Were you able to show a causal relationship between the reduction in these crimes and the passage of one of these bills?
JOHN LOTT: Yes, I believe I was.
SENATOR CHAMBERS: How did you establish the causal relationship?
JOHN LOTT: Well. one very nice thing about this data is that you have so many states passing these laws in so many different years.
SENATOR CHAMBERS: That's not good enough because two things happen at the same time doesn't mean it's causal. I don't want you to tell me how many states. I want you to tell me the causal relationship and how you establish it.
JOHN LOTT: Well. I don't think there's any one thing that establishes the causality. I think there are many different factors that you can take into account. The fact is that you have so many states that pass these laws in so many different years it's possible for you to control for things like other things that affect the penalties that people face, changes in the arrest rate, conviction rates, prison sentence lengths, you can control for other things that determine crime cycles over time. you can control for demographic changes, you can control for changes in income, poverty, unemployment. And, you know, when you deal with only one county or one state, it's very possible that something else might be occurring that you're not able to control for. But the more different places that you're able to pick up at different times, the probability that you're going to be missing one factor that just happens to be occurring in all those different states just at the point in time when these particular laws are being adopted.
SENATOR CHAMBERS: But, Professor, you're talking about...when you talk about statistical probability...
JOHN LOTT: Yeah, there's much more, too, that I think...
SENATOR CHAMBERS: ...then that does not establish causality.
JOHN LOTT: I think there's much more that's going on, too. If you were to graph out the changes in these crime rates over time after these laws happen, in fact, I think one diagram was passed around there (Exhibit 8), you see that crime rates were generally increasing up until the point that the law occurred. Right at that time you saw a leveling off and then a very quick drop that occurred. And it's amazing how closely that follows the number of permits. I know some people have asked earlier the Senator when he spoke how permits change over time, and I'd be happy to talk about that.
SENATOR CHAMBERS: No, no, I just want you to...
JOHN LOTT: But there's a very strong...
SENATOR CHAMBERS: ...I want you to try to address the question that I asked and if you can't then just tell me because I don't want the lecture and I don't want the whole report. Mow you have done studies, causality, the cause of the thing means without that you would not have the effect. You're telling me. if I understand you correctly, that without the passage of these particular laws then crime rates would have stayed at the level they were or gone higher without the passage of these laws. That's what you're telling me, isn't it?
JOHN LOTT: That's correct.
SENATOR CHAMBERS: Okay, and I don't believe you've established that and I don't believe you can establish causality through statistical probability. It works in academic circles, but it is not the way to establish causality unless you have a different definition of causality than I do.
JOHN LOTT: Well, maybe you could explain to me what your objection was. I could try to respond.
SENATOR CHAMBERS: No, that's all right. I think you've been very indulgent. I think you've been very helpful. And I don't have any more questions to ask you. Thank you.
JOHN LOTT: All right, thank you.
SENATOR BRASHEAR: Further questions for Professor Lott? Thank you, sir.
JOHN LOTT: Thank you very much.