More guns, more crime: New research debunks a central thesis of the gun rights movement

[applegrove]

More guns, more crime: New research debunks a central thesis of the gun rights movement

By Christopher Ingraham at the Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/11/14/more-guns-more-crime-new-research-debunks-a-central-thesis-of-the-gun-rights-movement/

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Now, Stanford law professor John Donohue and his colleagues have added another full decade to the analysis, extending it through 2010, and have concluded that the opposite of Lott and Mustard's original conclusion is true: more guns equal more crime.

"The totality of the evidence based on educated judgments about the best statistical models suggests that right-to-carry laws are associated with substantially higher rates" of aggravated assault, robbery, rape and murder, Donohue said in an interview with the Stanford Report. The evidence suggests that right-to-carry laws are associated with an 8 percent increase in the incidence of aggravated assault, according to Donohue. He says this number is likely a floor, and that some statistical methods show an increase of 33 percent in aggravated assaults involving a firearm after the passage of right-to-carry laws.

These findings build on and strengthen the conclusions of Donohue's earlier research, which only used data through 2006. In addition to having nearly two decades' worth of additional data to work with, Donohue's findings also improve upon Lott and Mustard's research by using a variety of different statistical models, as well as controlling for a number of confounding factors, like the crack epidemic of the early 1990s.

These new findings are strong. But there's rarely such a thing as a slam-dunk in social science research. Donohue notes that "different statistical models can yield different estimated effects, and our ability to ascertain the best model is imperfect." Teasing out cause from effect in social science research is often a fraught proposition.


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