John Donohue: “I’m Frequently Called a Treasonous Enemy of the Constitution.” - Freakonomics
"DONOHUE: Essentially, there are laws now on the books in almost all states that allow citizens, as a matter of right, to carry handguns if they’re concealed. Back in 1985, most states either totally banned such concealed carry or restricted it greatly. But as the National Rifle Association and the gun lobby, in general, tried to find ways to expand gun sales, they pushed for the adoption of these laws. And in 1997, John Lott wrote a very influential paper with David Mustard, in which he claimed that right-to-carry laws led to large decreases in crime. And this paper has had quite a lot of influence as the power of the N.R.A. grew and the Republican Party really made this an important part of their platform to expand gun rights. John Lott’s conclusion was that when you allowed citizens to carry concealed weapons, they could thwart or scare off criminals and that this would reduce crime.
LEVITT: But you and Ian Ayres wrote a paper in 1999 that suggested that the data analysis that had been done by Lott and Mustard wasn’t really very high quality...
DONOHUE: Lott was one of the early people doing a particular type of statistical analysis, and I suspect that he was doing the best job that he could at the time. But as you know, with statistical studies, there are certain requirements if you’re going to get sensible results. And in a number of ways, his analysis fell into some of these pitfalls.
LEVITT: So, you wrote this paper in 1999 where you pointed out these pitfalls that he had run into. I suppose that convinced him you were right and that ended the debate right there?
DONOHUE: Yeah. No, John is very tenacious. I will give him credit for that. And he tried to emphasize that he was right. Lott ended up writing a book called More Guns, Less Crime. It was quite a big seller. And he got a lot of praise in certain circles for it, became the hero of the N.R.A. crowd. Once you’ve gone down that path, it can be hard to reverse positions. Sometimes the saying is, in the academic world, “Progress comes one death at a time,” because it’s hard to change people’s minds.
LEVITT: Can you give me a simple example of how you changed the methodology when you were looking at the More Guns, Less Crime analysis to come up with an answer that made more sense?
DONOHUE: One problem is that in doing these sorts of analyses, you need to have good ways to control for factors that are correlated with things like the right-to-carry law, but perhaps influence crime in a way that would obscure our ability to figure out what the impact of the right-to-carry law is. And one of those things was the crack-cocaine problem. Remember Lott was writing in 1997. And his data went from 1977 to 1992. And so, the last five or six years of his data was very heavily influenced by the enormous increase in crime that surrounded the crack-cocaine problem. And since he didn’t control for that in any effective way, states that refused to adopt right-to-carry laws had big run-up in crimes because of the crack-cocaine problem. Other states that did not have the crack-cocaine problem adopted the right-to-carry law. And it was really this factor that appeared to suggest that the right-to-carry law was suppressing crime. But it was really the differential enactment of the right-to-carry laws in states with crack problems and without crack problems...
The National Academy of Sciences put together a panel a number of years ago looking at exactly this issue. And at that point, they said that the evidence was not clear enough to establish what the true answer was. But they were convinced that Lott’s work was too weak a body of science to generate the conclusion that he did. But I think now, in the last five years, my paper, and those of a number of other individuals, has pretty much established that when you go into these state laws expanding access to concealed carry, you’re going to get increases in violent crime...
LEVITT: So, even putting politics aside for a moment, do you think there are actually approaches to gun control that could work? Because I’m skeptical of gun control in general. We have a basic problem, which is that there are 200 million guns out there. And guns last basically forever if you take care of them. So, you have this stock of guns that will be there forever. And I don’t really understand how you’d legislate around that. What does gun control even mean in a world where you already have 200 million guns on the streets?...
DONOHUE: The weaponry is getting much more sophisticated. You made the point earlier that guns last forever. And it used to be that you had the gun that was the family gun. Now, guns have become a lot like cell phones. Every year, there’s a new tweak on them and you want to make them faster and more powerful...
And another interesting problem is that when people start carrying guns on their person, they expose them to theft a lot more. And, of course, every time a gun is stolen, then it’s immediately in the hands of a criminal. Reasonable estimates of the number of guns stolen simply by virtue of the adoption of right-to-carry laws is in the neighborhood of 100,000 to 150,000 per year. So, it’s not a trivial impact on criminal activity...
The death penalty, at least as administered in the United States, is incredibly expensive, because you’ve got litigation, which means lawyers and judges going on for extended periods of time. And if you actually took all of the resources that are used to run your capital regime and put it into the effective crime-fighting measures, even if there happened to be some deterrent value of the death penalty, you’d get a much bigger bang for your buck in expending those resources in a different way..
LEVITT: I really thought the skepticism towards our hypothesis [about abortion reducing crime] might change in 2019, when we released a new abortion crime working paper, where we did something really unlike anything I’ve seen in academic economics in my career. Because abortion affects crime with roughly a 20-year lag, the cohort has to grow up before they start committing crimes. We were able in our initial paper to make predictions about what would happen over the next 20 years to crime patterns in the United States.
And we waited and then we went back to the data and every single prediction that we made was borne out. What was most amazing to me was that nobody seemed to care when we put out that new paper, unlike the first time where everybody got all agitated. People just ignored it. I just looked in Google Scholar and we have a total of seven citations on this new paper. It’s interesting that what was once such a heated topic, now I think everyone’s just decided it’s not right...
When I was much younger, I complained one day to my senior colleague, Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker, that I was exhausted because I was spending all day, every day, fighting with all the people who are attacking me. He responded by saying, “I love it when people attack me. It means they’re paying attention. What I hate is being ignored.” Now, I would certainly take being loved over being hated, but Gary was right. The absolute worst is to be ignored."
