Gun Control’s Effect on Violence, Part III

I have been following the work of Robert VerBruggen as he examines new research into the effects of gun control on violence. In my first installment, I showed you VerBruggen’s dismantling of the “gun violence index.” In the second installment, I highlighted VerBruggen’s examination of a research paper comparing laws in cities across America. Today, I’ll show you VerBruggen’s examination of background checks and their effects. VerBruggen writes:

When talking about background checks, liberals love to bring up Missouri and Connecticut, both of which have experimented with “permit-to-purchase” handgun laws. Under these laws, anyone seeking to buy a handgun must first acquire a permit from a law-enforcement agency, where a background check (and often an interview) are conducted. Unlike the federal background-check requirement, these laws apply to private sales between individuals, not just purchases from licensed dealers.

In the left’s telling, the law was a spectacular success in both states. The reality is more complicated.

The liberal narrative holds best—incredibly well, actually—in Missouri. When the state repealed its permit-to-purchase law in 2007, the homicide rate immediately rose, driven by an increase in gun homicides. At the exact same time, trace data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives indicated that a higher percentage of Missouri crime guns were originally purchased within the state.

The data are visually striking. You can see the ATF numbers in this article, … I’ve divided Missouri’s rates of gun and non-gun homicide by the corresponding national rates. (This allows us to see what trends unfolded in Missouri that didn’t occur nationwide.)

But Connecticut is a very different story. It enacted a permit-to-purchase law in 1995, and … not a whole lot happened.

To deny this simple fact rooted in readily available data, liberals rely on a poorly conducted 2015 study that credited the law with a whopping 40 percent reduction in gun homicides. The study cut the data off in 2005 and, rather than using national or regional trends as its primary baseline, compared Connecticut’s crime trends with those of a “synthetic state”—a statistical abstraction mostly based on Rhode Island, which experienced a crime wave shortly after Connecticut’s law went into effect.

Enter Lott. In his book, he does spend some time going over the Missouri and Connecticut cases. (His assessment of Connecticut is the same as mine, but he reads the Missouri trends much differently than I do.) But far more importantly, he notes that numerous other states have enacted various background-check laws too, and he conducts analyses on all of the states at once, using data that run from 2000 to the most recent (2013 to 2015, depending on the variable). This approach avoids cherry-picking, and he helpfully provides these laws’ enactment dates in an appendix for anyone who would like to explore the data themselves.

As Lott notes, he actually studied the effects of background-check laws on the murder rate years ago, finding no significant impact. In his new book, he looks at a variety of other outcomes, including suicide rates, killings of women, and mass shootings, again finding no effect. His models control for things like guns coming in from other states (which liberals say undermine state-level background-check laws), demographics, and divorce rates. He also runs separate analyses for background checks on “at least some private transfers” vs. “universal background checks.”

John Lott: The War on Guns

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E.J. Smith - Your Survival Guy

E.J. Smith is 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. His focus at all times is on preparing clients and readers for “Times Like These.” 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. His first drum set was a 5-piece Slingerland with Zildjians. He grew-up worshiping Neil Peart (RIP) 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@yoursurvivalguy.com To sign up for my free monthly Survive & Thrive letter, click here.