by John R. Lott, Jr. by John R. Lott, Jr. Recently by John R. Lott, Jr.: Think Tough Gun Laws Keep EuropeansSafe? ThinkAgain…

As the number of President Obama’s judicial appointments and nominations continues to grow, it appears pretty clear that he does not care about the individual’s right to self-defense. We can tell this by looking at the record of his two Supreme Court picks but also by examining the long list of lower-level judicial appointments. All of these reflect a pattern of favoring person who have written anti-gun opinions.

Elena Kagan, Obama’s newest Supreme Court nominee, fits this mold. The Supreme Court has only been very narrowly supportive of an individual’s right to bear arms. For example, there was the 5-4 vote in the Heller decision when it struck down Washington, D.C.’s handgun ban in 2008 and a similar 5-4 vote in on Monday in the decision to strike down Chicago’s ban in “McDonald.”

In the future, Kagan’s opinion could be crucial: If Justice Kennedy or one of the four more conservative members of the court were to retire or die, her vote could easily tip the balance on gun rights.

Of course, Obama’s judicial nominations go against his 2008 campaign promises about guns. During the presidential campaign, then-Senator Obama, despite his past support for gun bans, assured voters that he had always supported the Second Amendment as an individual right:

"I have said consistently that I believe that the Second Amendment is an individual right, and that was the essential decision that the Supreme Court came down on."

With those words in mind, alarm bells should have gone off during Elena Kagan’s confirmation testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. Here’s what Kagan told Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa):

It has long been thought, starting from the “Miller” case, that the Second Amendment did not protect such a right. . . . Now the Heller decision has marked a very fundamental moment in the court’s jurisprudence with respect to the Second Amendment. And as I suggested to Senator Feinstein there is not question going forward that ‘Heller’ is the law, that it is entitled to all the precedent that any decision is entitled to and that is true to the ‘McDonald’ case as well…

There are two big problems with Kagan’s remarks: she inaccurately describes the 1939 "Miller" case and her claims to follow stare decisis are meaningless.

The "Miller" decision said that the Second Amendment protected civilian use of firearms that are used in the military and that a sawed off shotgun wasn’t a military weapon. But the court went no farther in explaining the right. There was no discussion of the modern liberal view of a “collective right.” The very short opinion didn’t say if there was an individual right to own military weapons. The issues were never addressed.

However, Kagan’s argument is precisely what Justice Stevens wrote about when he and the other liberal Supreme Court justices opposed “Heller.” They claimed that Miller was the real precedent and that there was no individual right to own a gun. Stevens asserted that “Heller” and “McDonald” were the real aberrations from court precedent.

Kagan’s statement surely shows that she also believes the “Heller” decision broke with past precedent. Saying that “Heller” and “McDonald” are “entitled to all the precedent that any decision is entitled to” also means that her strained interpretation of Miller is entitled to the same precedent.

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John Lott [send him mail] is the author of Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t and The Bias Against Guns (Regnery 2003).

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Multiple victim public shootings were assumed to be an American thing for it is here the guns are, right? No, not at all. Contrary to public perception, Western Europe, where most countries have much tougher gun laws, has experienced many of the worst multiple victim public shootings. Particularly telling, all the multiple victim public shootings in Europe occurred where guns are banned. So it is in the United States, too — all the multiple victim public shootings (where more than three people have been killed) have taken place where civilians are not allowed to have a gun.

Look at recent history. Where have the worst K—12 school shootings occurred? It has not been in the U.S. but Europe. The very worst one occurred in a high school in Erfurt, Germany in 2002, where 18 were killed. The second worst took place in Dunblane, Scotland in 1996, where 16 kindergarteners and their teacher were shot. The third worst high school attack, with 15 murdered, happened in Winnenden, Germany. The fourth worst shooting was in the U.S. — Columbine High School in 1999, leaving 13 killed. The fifth worst school related murder spree, with 11 murdered, occurred in Emsdetten, Germany.

With three of the worst five attacks, Germany may be a surprise to those who believe in gun control. Even by European standards, Germany has some of the strictest gun control laws. Indeed, these laws are far stricter than existing gun control in the U.S., or for that matter, the restrictions currently being discussed in the United States.

Though not quite as tight as U.K. regulations, Germany has strict licensing and registration requirements. German licenses are only valid for three years and to obtain a gun license people must demonstrate such hard-to-define characteristics as trustworthiness as well as convince authorities that they have a necessity for a gun. This comes on top of requirements against mental disorders, drug or alcohol addictions, violence or aggressive tendencies, and felony convictions.

The attacks in Europe might not get as much attention in the U.S. or even in other countries in Europe besides where the attack occurred as the attack in the U.S., but multiple victim public shootings appear to be at least as common in Europe as they are here. The following is a partial list of attacks occurring in Europe since 2001. As mentioned, all of them occurred in gun free zones, places where guns in the hands of civilians were not allowed:

• Zug, Switzerland, September 27, 2001: a man murdered 15 members of a cantonal parliament.
• Tours, France, October 29, 2001: four people were killed and 10 wounded when a French railway worker started killing people at a busy intersection in the city.
• Nanterre, France, March 27, 2002: a man kills eight city councilors after a city council meeting.
• Erfurt, Germany on April 26, 2002: a former student kills 18 at a secondary school.
• Freising, Germany on February 19, 2002: Three people killed and one wounded.
• Turin, Italy on October 15, 2002: Seven people were killed on a hillside overlooking the city.
• Madrid, Spain, October 1, 2006: a man kills two employees and wounds another at a company that he was fired from.
• Emsdetten, Germany, November 20, 2006: a former student murders 11 people at a high school.
• Southern Finland, November 7, 2007: Seven students and the principal were killed at a high school.
• Naples, Italy, September 18, 2008: Seven dead and two seriously wounded in a public meeting hall (not included in totals below because it may possibly have involved the mafia).
• Kauhajoki, Finland, Sept. 23, 2008: 10 people were shot to death at a college.
• Winnenden, Germany, March 11, 2009: a 17-year-old former student killed 15 people, including nine students and three teachers.
• Lyon, France, March 19, 2009: ten people injured after a man opened fire on a nursery school.
• Athens, Greece, April 10, 2009: three people killed and two people injured by a student at a vocational college.
• Rotterdam, Netherlands, April 11, 2009: three people killed and 1 injured at a crowded cafe.
• Vienna, Austria, May 24, 2009: one dead and 16 wounded in an attack on a Sikh Temple.
• Espoo, Finland, Dec. 31, 2009: 4 killed while shopping at a mall on New Year’s Eve.
• Cumbria, England, June 2, 2010: 12 people killed by a British taxi driver.

So how does this compare to the United States? The University of Chicago’s Bill Landes and I have collected data on all the multiple victim public shootings in the United States from 1977 to 1999 (for a discussion of that information see the newly revised third edition of my book More Guns, Less Crime). If we only examine those cases where 4 or more people have been killed in an attack, the worst such attack was the Luby’s Cafeteria shooting in which 23 people died. On average 10.56 people have died each year.

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John Lott [send him mail] is the author of Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t and The Bias Against Guns (Regnery 2003).

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by John R. Lott, Jr. by John R. Lott, Jr.

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Would you like elections without secret ballots? To most Americans, the notion is absurd. But, if Barack Obama becomes president, secret ballots seem destined to end for at least one type of election: union certifications.

The reasons for secret ballots are obvious. Not everyone feels comfortable making his or her political positions public; many would rather vote without fear of offending or angering someone else. Secret balloting essentially ended an old abuse, vote buying, in US elections.

Yet Obama promises to sign into law the so-called Employee Free Choice Act — which would end secret-ballot elections when it comes to unionization of workplaces.

Unionization is now a two-step process: When 50 percent of workers in a company sign statements requesting a unionization vote, that merely sets up a second stage, where workers vote by secret ballot on whether to unionize. Under the "card-check" system, however, unionization would be certified as soon as half the workers had signed cards stating that they favor union representation.

In other words, a worker can now placate union supporters by signing a statement saying he wants a union, but then vote the other way when protected by the secrecy of the voting booth.

Unions now win about 60 percent of certification elections. The rules change would not only make that 100 percent — adding 500-plus new unionized shops a year — but also ensure that unions seek many more certifications. You can see why the AFL-CIO calls the Employee Free Choice Act its "million-member mobilization."

Unions are desperate to increase membership, which has been falling for decades — from 35 percent of the private-sector workforce in the 1950s to 8.2 percent in 2007.

Big Labor is making an all-out push to get this passed, having budgeted $360 million on this year’s election, $200 million more than in 2004. The Service Employees International Union alone is spending $75 million this year — and committed to making 10 million phone calls to Congress early next year to ensure the bill gets enacted.

Obama claims that strengthening unions is good because unions will "lift up the middle-class in this country once more." If so, why are these very people voting against unions?

In fact, unionization virtually always raises some workers’ pay at the expense of others. (In particular, companies typically have to compensate for the higher payroll costs by using fewer employees.) They also equalize wages within jobs — preventing harder working, more productive employees from earning more than less productive ones.

And those aren’t the only problems. Protecting teachers unions from competition comes at the expense of students. Protecting workers from trade competition comes at the expense of customers and even other workers. (If you protect steel workers from competition, for example, the price of US-made cars rises relative to foreign-made ones.)

Sen. George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, has broken with his own party over card-check. In an ad opposing the bill, he says, "It is hard to believe that any politician would agree to a law denying millions of employees a right to a private vote." McGovern is so concerned that he has let the ad be targeted against Democrats nationally as well as in seven states with close Senate races.

Obama may feel that card-check will help US workers, or he may simply believe he needs to reward Big Labor for its support. Either way, ending secret-ballot union votes is guaranteed to make the country — and most workers — poorer.

This article originally appeared in the New York Post.

John Lott [send him mail] is the author of Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t and The Bias Against Guns (Regnery 2003).

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by John R. Lott, Jr. by John R. Lott, Jr.

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This is still a free country, right? Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation to more closely regulate the wages that firms pay workers and to more strictly regulate tobacco products by putting them under FDA supervision.

The Los Angeles City Council also approved a one-year moratorium on new fast-food restaurants in a 32-square-mile low-income area in the city; the poor, after all, have “above-average rates of obesity” and must be protected from themselves.

Perhaps the government may just want to ask people if they are poor before we let them enter certain restaurants.

Barack Obama promises a national ban on smoking in public places. Such micro-managing of people’s behavior will likely only get worse, as anyone who has been to countries such as Sweden can attest.

When I visited Sweden in back in 1979, Swedes were worried that binge drinkers were damaging their health. But shouldn’t how much people drink in the privacy of their own home be their own business? Not to other Swedes, who worried that the government health care system meant they would have to pick up others’ medical costs.

I watched the television news in horror as police broke into homes and took people to detox centers after neighbors alerted the government to people who they felt were drinking too much. But they were equally outraged that people would do things to their bodies that would make others pay for their health care.

The Democrats’ “Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act” is a strange creature. It prevents the FDA from banning existing tobacco products. However, products introduced after Feb. 15, 2007, must receive FDA approval, a process that may take up to a couple of years even to start. The bill allows the remaining forms of advertising and the promotion of cigarettes to be banned.

The regulations would actually benefit existing tobacco companies, protecting them from competition. Academic research has found that the 1970 TV and radio advertising ban actually increased tobacco company profits because it protected established brands from competition. The FDA approval process for new cigarettes only adds to this protection.

Congressmen backing the legislation point to estimates that 400,000 people die each year from smoking. But while smoking undoubtedly causes illnesses and deaths, it is hard to take such estimates seriously.

No matter what other risk factors a person might have, when a smoker dies, the death is attributed to tobacco. But smokers are more likely to drink heavily, less likely to exercise, be overweight, and have poor nutritional habits. If a smoker who is obese, never exercises and has a long family history of heart problems dies from a heart attack, why should it automatically be classified as due to smoking?

The ultimate question, though, is whether we should let people make choices for themselves. Should ice cream be banned? Surely it adds to obesity, causing some heart attacks. But some people amazingly enough like the way ice cream tastes and are willing to take the risks. Are they making a mistake?

Smokers, like those who eat ice cream, have trade-offs. Some might like the taste, others its calming effects. But smoking may also reduce the risk of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases as well as cancers of the thyroid, breast and skin.

In any case, whether it is hang gliding or smoking, it ought to be the customers’ preferences that count.

Proposals such as Obama’s for a national ban on smoking in public places have their own problems. The ultimate objection to smoking focuses on the harm that it imposes on others. The evidence for harm from second-hand smoke is extremely weak, but, for the sake of argument, let’s accept the claim.

Environmental problems arise because the costs of polluters’ actions are passed on to other people. The classic case is the “common pool” or “overfishing” problem. Fishermen tend to overfish an area until the fishery is depleted. If one fisherman lets a fish go so that it can spawn, there is no guarantee that another fisherman won’t catch that same fish. But this problem is eliminated in privately-owned fisheries, such as private lakes or fish farms. If a fishery is running low on fish, the owner can leave fish to spawn, knowing that no one else will catch them.

Outdoor air pollution suffers a similar “common pool” problem; if too many individuals or companies emit too much pollution, the combined result can produce illness and even death. Everything from cars to power plants emits byproducts that can be classified as harmful, but no one would argue that we should eliminate cars and power plants because their pollution costs outweigh all their benefits. Similar to fishermen out at sea, individual car makers or factory owners are unlikely to take into account the cost that their pollution imposes upon others. Altruism only goes so far. This creates a legitimate space for government intervention — governments can regulate pollution levels by limiting, taxing, or otherwise restricting pollution emissions.

Allowing the government — whether federal, state, or local — to regulate pollution may be necessary, but we can only watch with dismay as the government uses this authority to steadily expand its coercive powers. In doing so, it inevitably begins mandating solutions to tangential “problems” that are best left to the market to solve. Solutions that actually make the country poorer.

This is most evident today in the restaurant industry, where local governments are becoming increasingly intrusive in ensuring clean air. A restaurant owner will face competitive pressures to decide whether his customers want to be allowed to smoke, just as he must figure out what food to serve, how big the portions will be, and what kind of décor to have. Restaurants that don’t satisfy their customers on these issues will quickly go out of business.

That’s why smoking in restaurants should not be considered a common pool problem subject to government intervention. Restaurants that allow smoking don’t base their policy merely on their love of smokers; they are responding to competitive pressures and customer preferences. And, of course, the choice doesn’t have to be between perfectly pristine air and air so cloudy that you can’t see more than a few feet ahead; many restaurants simply create smoking and non-smoking sections. But this solution, too, is outlawed by government smoking bans.

If restaurants can go out of business when they don’t get small things right, such as whether to include an extra side dish with a meal or what kind of background music is played, why is there any less reason to believe their decision on smoking will likewise reflect customer demand? If anything, the fact that people feel so strongly about smoking — both for and against it — implies that restaurants will very carefully tailor their smoking policies to their customers’ wishes.

The situation is no different for employees at the restaurant. If employers provide a work environment that employees don’t like (say, because some object to smoky air), employers have to pay more to get people to work there. Restaurant smoking is more like a private fishery than a common pool.

Nonsmokers may feel better off because of bans, but what they gain is less than what smokers lose. If the opposite were true, it wouldn’t be necessary to impose the bans.

This article was originally published at Fox News.

John Lott [send him mail] is the author of Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t and The Bias Against Guns (Regnery 2003).

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by John R. Lott, Jr. by John R. Lott, Jr.

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The Supreme Court may have confirmed that Americans have the right to own guns for protection, but the gun debate is hardly over.

The District of Columbia, whose handgun ban was struck down by the Supreme Court, is still planning on banning most handguns.

And the court decision has spurred the media into overdrive to paint guns as dangerous to their owners.

No one who has taken even a quick glance at the crime data can seriously argue that the D.C. gun ban lowered murder or violent crime rates.

The concerns being raised are not the threat from criminals, but that guns pose a risk to their owners.

In particular, buying a gun and having it in your home is said to increase the likelihood of suicide.

Mike Stobbe for the Associated Press emphasized the problem by pointing out that the majority of gun deaths are suicides.

He also noticed that Supreme Court Justice Breyer mentioned his concerns about gun suicides 14 times in his dissent.

By contrast, he mentioned accidental gun deaths only three times.

That is not surprising, given that the accidental death rate from guns is so low not only absolutely but in comparison to other common household items.

A nationally syndicated article by Shankar Vedantam, a Washington Post columnist, has a similar concern.

Vedantam points to a 1991 study in the New England Journal of Medicine that claims that after examining data from 1968 to 1987, “the gun ban correlated with an abrupt 25 percent decline in suicides in the city” and that the “decline was entirely driven by a decline in firearm-related suicide.”

Yes, suicides did indeed decline after the ban.

However, it is unlikely to have much to do with banning guns as non-gun suicides fell even slightly faster than gun suicides (see the graph) (pdf).

If the gun ban caused the drop in suicides, why would the non-gun suicide rate fall at least as much as the gun suicide rate?

A far more likely explanation is that something else was changing and causing people to not want to commit suicide, no matter what method they might consider.

Click here for graph (pdf).

Yet, the D.C. experience isn’t unique.

The National Academy of Sciences released a 2004 report that comprehensively reviewed academic research studying guns and suicide.

The panel set up under the Clinton administration surveyed the extensive literature from public health, economics and criminology. The Academy concluded that "Some gun control policies may reduce the number of gun suicides, but they have not yet been shown to reduce the overall risk of suicide in any population.”

The association between gun ownership and gun suicide was “modest” and not particularly consistent.

In addition, the panel pointed out that even the studies that claim more guns increase gun suicides are “unclear” on why the relationship exists.

Yet, more importantly, the presence of guns had no impact on total suicides.

That finding is true not only for the United States, but also across countries.

This isn’t particularly surprising.

There are so many different ways for people to kill themselves: people can jump off buildings or crash their car into a telephone pole or head-on into another car.

In a high suicide rate country such as Japan, many people jump in front of subway trains.

Guns are one of the most lethal and effective methods of committing suicide, but how lethal the different methods are has a lot to do with whether someone wants to successfully commit suicide.

For example, the vast majority of attempted suicides by women are apparently not meant to be successful (just calls for help). They usually choose methods, such as taking only a relatively few sleeping pills, that are destined to fail.

But that hardly means that if you take someone who was intent on killing themselves and have them use sleeping pills, that they will also fail.

There is a great irony about this whole debate.

Generally, liberals, both on and off the Supreme Court, are the ones concerned about guns being used to commit suicide.

Yet, those same liberals opposed restrictions on drugs used in physician-assisted suicides.

The court forbade the U.S. Attorney General from claiming that suicide is not a “legitimate medical purpose.”

How is it OK for the justices to prevent regulations of drugs that are used to commit suicides, but support the banning of guns used for the same purpose?

If anything, the court can probably more effectively end physician-assisted suicides by banning drugs than they could end suicides by banning guns. Could the answer simply be that liberals dislike guns, not drugs?

More conservative justices, who believe that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to own guns, don’t face the same logical conflict.

Even if they would like to regulate suicide with guns and even if they believed that gun ownership affected the total level of suicides, the Second Amendment protects the individual’s right to own guns.

There is no similar protection for drugs.

The debate about protecting people from themselves is a familiar one.

But even if those seeking to ban guns are right that more guns mean more suicides, who is best positioned to weigh the risks and benefits from letting people protect themselves?

If people are unable to make these decisions for themselves, how can people figure out which politicians should make these decisions for them?

This article was originally published at Fox News.

John Lott [send him mail] is the author of Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t and The Bias Against Guns (Regnery 2003).

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by John R. Lott, Jr. by John R. Lott, Jr.

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On abortion, a large gap exists between John McCain and Barack Obama. The National Right to Life Committee as well as Pro-choice America agree that Obama has a perfect 100 percent pro-choice voting record. McCain is pro-life, and the two groups respectively claim that he votes that way at least 75 percent of the time. It should make for a lively debate this fall.

But the question of abortion usually centers only on the morality of the act (choice versus life), and McCain and Obama so far look to frame the question no differently. Morality surely is important, but its emphasis misses out on the much wider impact that these laws have.

Liberalizing abortion rules from 1969 to 1973 ignited vast long-term social changes in America. This discussion might finally provide a chance to evaluate how Roe v. Wade has changed the U.S.

One often misunderstood fact: Legal abortions didn’t start with Roe or even with the five states that liberalized abortion laws in 1969 and 1970. Prior to Roe, women could have had abortions when their lives or health were endangered.

Doctors in some surprising states, such as Kansas, had very liberal interpretations of what constituted danger to health; nevertheless, Roe did substantially increase abortions, more than doubling the rate per live birth in the five years from 1972 to 1977.

But many other changes occurred at the same time:

• A sharp increase in pre-marital sex.
• A sharp rise in out-of-wedlock births.
• A drop in the number of children placed for adoption.
• A decline in marriages that occur after the woman is pregnant.

Many of these changes might seem contradictory. Why would both the number of abortions and out-of-wedlock births go up? If there were more illegitimate births, why were fewer children available for adoption?

For the first puzzle, part of the answer lies in attitudes toward premarital sex. With abortion seen as a backup, women as well as men became less careful in using contraceptives as well as more likely to have premarital sex.

There were more unplanned pregnancies. But legal abortion did not mean every unplanned pregnancy led to abortion. After all, just because abortion is legal does not mean that the decision is an easy one.

Academic studies have found that legalized abortion, by encouraging premarital sex, increased the number of unplanned births, even outweighing the reduction in unplanned births due to abortion.

In the United States from the early 1970s, when abortion was liberalized, through the late 1980s, there was a tremendous increase in the rate of out-of-wedlock births, rising from an average of 5 percent of all births from 1965 to 1969 to more than 16 percent two decades later (1985 to 1989).

For blacks, the numbers soared from 35 percent to 62 percent. While not all of this rise can be attributed to liberalized abortion rules, it was a key contributing factor, nevertheless.

With legalization and a woman not forced to go through with an unplanned pregnancy, a man might well expect his partner to have an abortion if a sexual encounter were to result in an unplanned pregnancy.

But what happens if the woman refuses — say, she is morally opposed or, perhaps, she thought she could have an abortion but upon becoming pregnant decides she can’t go through with it?

Many men, feeling tricked into unwanted fatherhood, likely will wash their hands of the affair altogether, thinking, “I never wanted a baby. It’s her choice, so let her raise the baby herself.”

What is expected of men in this position has changed dramatically in the last four decades. Evidence shows that the greater availability of abortion largely ended “shotgun” marriages, where men felt obligated to marrying the women.

What has happened to these babies of reluctant fathers?

The mothers often raise the children on their own. Even as abortion has led to more out-of-wedlock births it has dramatically reduced adoptions of children born in America by two-parent families.

Before Roe, when abortion was much more difficult, women who would have chosen an abortion but were unable to get one turned to adoption as their backup. After Roe, women who turned down an abortion also were the type who wanted to keep the child.

But all these changes — rising out-of-wedlock births, plummeting adoption rates and the end of shotgun marriages — meant one thing: more single-parent families. With work and other demands on their time, single parents, no matter how “wanted” their child may be, tend to devote less attention to their children than do married couples; after all, it’s difficult for one person to spend as much time with a child as two people can.

From the beginning of the abortion debate, those favoring abortion have pointed to the social costs of “unwanted” children who simply won’t get the attention of “wanted” ones. But there is a trade-off that has long been neglected. Abortion may eliminate “unwanted” children, but it increases out-of-wedlock births and single parenthood. Unfortunately, the social consequences of illegitimacy dominated.

Children born after liberalized abortion rules have suffered a series of problems from difficulties at school to more crime. The saddest fact is that it is the most vulnerable in society, poor blacks, who have suffered the most from these changes.

No matter who wins the election or controls the Supreme Court, abortions are unlikely to be outlawed, just as they were not outlawed before the court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973.

Liberalized abortion undoubtedly has made life easier for many, but like sex itself sometimes, it has had many unintended consequences.

Violent crime in the United States soared after 1960. From 1960 to 1991, reported violent crime increased by an incredible 372 percent. This disturbing trend was seen across the country, with robbery peaking in 1991 and rape and aggravated assault following in 1992. But then something unexpected happened: Between 1991 and 2000, rates of violent crime and property crime fell sharply, dropping by 33 percent and 30 percent, respectively. Murder rates were stable up to 1991, but then plunged by a steep 44 percent.

Many plausible explanations have been advanced for the drop during the 1990s. Some stress law-enforcement measures, such as higher arrest and conviction rates, longer prison sentences, “broken windows” police strategies, and the death penalty. Others emphasize right-to-carry laws for concealed handguns, a strong economy, or the waning of the crack-cocaine epidemic.

Yet, of all the explanations, perhaps the most controversial is the one that attributes lower crime rates in the ’90s to Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision to mandate legalized abortion. According to this argument, the large number of women who began having abortions shortly after Roe were most likely unmarried, in their teens, or poor, and their children would have been “unwanted.” Children born in these circumstances would have had a higher-than-average likelihood of becoming criminals, and would have entered their teens — their “criminal prime” — in the early 1990s. But because they were aborted, they were not around to make trouble.

It is an attention-grabbing theory, to be sure, possibly even more noteworthy than recent research indicating that liberalizing abortion increased pre-marital sex, increased out-of-wedlock births, reduced adoptions and ended so-called shotgun marriages.

But a thorough analysis of abortion and crime statistics leads to the opposite conclusion: that abortion increases crime.

The question about abortion and crime was greatly influenced by a Swedish study published in 1966 by Hans Forssman and Inga Thuwe. They followed the children of 188 women who were denied abortions from 1939 to 1941 at the only hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden. Their study compared these “unwanted” children with another group, this one composed of the first child born at the hospital after each of the “unwanted” children. They found that the “unwanted” children were much more likely to grow up in adverse conditions — for example, with divorced parents, or in foster homes. These children were also more likely to become delinquents and have trouble in school. Unfortunately, the authors never investigated whether the children’s “unwantedness” caused their problems, or were simply correlated with them.

Forssman and Thuwe’s claim, notwithstanding the limits of the data supporting it, became axiomatic among supporters of legalized abortion. During the 1960s and ’70s, before Roe, abortion-rights advocates attributed all sorts of social ills, including crime and mental illness, to “unwanted” children. Weeding these poor, crime-prone people out of the population through abortion was presented as a way to make society safer.

Indeed, the 1972 Rockefeller Commission on Population and the American Future, established by Richard Nixon, cited research purporting that the children of women denied an abortion “turned out to have been registered more often with psychiatric services, engaged in more antisocial and criminal behavior, and have been more dependent on public assistance.”

Even in the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, Justice Harry Blackmun noted the same social problems attributed to “unwanted” children.

Recently, two economists — John Donohue and Steven Levitt — tried resurrecting the debate. They presented evidence that supposedly demonstrated abortion’s staggeringly large effect on crime rates, and argued that up to “one-half of the overall crime reduction” between 1991 and 1997, and up to 81 percent of the drop in murder rates during that period, was attributable to the rise in abortions in the early to mid 1970s. If that claim was accurate, they had surely found the Holy Grail of crime reduction.

Most people who challenge the “abortion reduces crime” argument do so on ethical grounds, rather than trying to rebut the empirical evidence. But it is worth looking at the data, too — because they do not prove what they are supposed to.

To understand why abortion might not cut crime, one should first consider how dramatically it changed sexual relationships. Once abortion became widely available, people engaged in much more premarital sex, and also took less care in using contraceptives. Abortion, after all, offered a backup if a woman got pregnant, making premarital sex, and the nonuse of contraception, less risky. In practice, however, many women found that they couldn’t go through with an abortion, and out-of-wedlock births soared. Few of these children born out of wedlock were put up for adoption; most women who were unwilling to have abortions were also unwilling to give up their children. Abortion also eliminated the social pressure on men to marry women who got pregnant. All of these outcomes — more out-of-wedlock births, fewer adoptions than expected, and less pressure on men “to do the right thing” — led to a sharp increase in single-parent families.

Multiple studies document this change. From the early 1970s through the late 1980s, as abortion became more and more frequent, there was a tremendous increase in the rate of out-of-wedlock births, from an average of 5 percent (1965—69) to over 16 percent 20 years later (1985—1989). Among blacks, the number jumped from 35 percent to 62 percent. While not all of this rise can be attributed to liberalized abortion laws, they were certainly a key contributor.

What happened to all these children raised by single women? No matter how much they want their children, single parents tend to devote less attention to them than married couples do. Single parents are less likely than married parents to read to their children or take them on excursions, and more likely to feel angry at their children or to feel that they are burdensome. Children raised out of wedlock have more social and developmental problems than children of married couples by almost any measure — from grades to school expulsion to disease. Unsurprisingly, children from unmarried families are also more likely to become criminals.

So the opposing lines of argument in the “abortion reduces crime” debate are clear: One side stresses that abortion eliminates “unwanted” children, the other that it increases out-of-wedlock births. The question is: Which consequence of abortion has the bigger impact on crime?

Unfortunately for those who argue that abortion reduces crime, Donahue and Levitt’s research suffered from methodological flaws. As The Economist noted, “Donohue and Levitt did not run the test that they thought they had.” Work by two economists at the Boston Federal Reserve, Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz, found that, when the test was run correctly, it indicated that abortion actually increases violent crime. John Whitley and I had written an earlier study that found a similar connection between abortion and murder — namely, that legalizing abortion raised the murder rate, on average, by about 7 percent.

The “abortion decreases crime” theory runs into even more problems when the population is analyzed by age group. Suppose that liberalizing abortion in the early 1970s can indeed explain up to 80 percent of the drop in murder during the 1990s, as Donohue and Levitt claim. Deregulating abortion would then reduce criminality first among age groups born after the abortion laws changed, when the “unwanted,” crime-prone elements began to be weeded out. Yet when we look at the declining murder rate during the 1990s, we find that this is not the case at all. Instead, murder rates began falling first among an older generation — those over 26 — born before Roe. It was only later that criminality among those born after Roe began to decline.

Legalizing abortion increased crime. Those born in the four years after Roe were much more likely to commit murder than those born in the four years prior. This was especially true when they were in their “criminal prime,” as shown in the nearby chart.

The “abortion decreases crime” argument gets even weaker when one looks at data from Canada. While crime rates in both the United States and Canada began declining at the same time, Canada liberalized its abortion laws much later than the U.S. did. Although Quebec effectively legalized abortion in late 1976, it wasn’t until 1988, in a case originating in Ontario, that the Canadian supreme court struck down limits on abortion nationwide. If the legalization of abortion in the U.S. caused crime to begin dropping 18 years later, why did the crime rate begin falling just three years after the comparable legal change in Canada?

Even if abortion did lower crime by culling out “unwanted” children (a conclusion derived from flawed statistics), this effect would be greatly outweighed by the rise in crime associated with the greater incidence of single-parent families that also follows from abortion liberalization. In short, more abortions have brought more crime.

This article was originally published at Fox News.

John Lott [send him mail] is the author of Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t and The Bias Against Guns (Regnery 2003).

John Lott Archives

by John R. Lott, Jr. by John R. Lott, Jr.

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No matter how well-meaning, politicians frequently fail to understand all the consequences of their laws. Real world costs, the costs and benefits faced by those who will actually have to live with the regulations, often elude those who pass these rules. Yet, even by those depressing standards, problems with the mandated that people will soon be forced to use stand out.

The advantages of compact fluorescent light bulbs are obvious. While the fluorescent bulbs can cost 10 times more than incandescent ones, fluorescent bulbs use 75 percent less electricity and last up to 10 times longer.

But longer life and energy savings come with a caveat — the fluorescent bulbs must be used for at least 15 minutes once they are turned on and ideally for at least several hours at a time. Turning them off quickly after you have turned them on dramatically reduces their life expectancy. Not being able to use light bulbs simply when it is convenient is a cost the consumers will bear even if politicians didn’t factor it into their estimates of savings.

But those are just a tiny fraction of the other real world costs. As many now know, the compact fluorescent light bulbs contain mercury. The hazards are not trivial. One study found that “immediately after the bulb was broken — and sometimes even after a cleanup was attempted — levels of mercury vapor exceeded federal guidelines for chronic exposure by as much as 100 times.”

The EPA has come up with detailed advice on how to put bulbs into sockets, clean up spills, dispose of bulbs, and even safely transport them. For example, drop cloths should be placed on the floor under sockets in case bulbs are dropped, to cushion the fall. But if that fails, the cleanup process becomes incredibly involved.

First, the EPA warns to immediately evacuate the room of all people and pets, and to ensure that no one walks through the breakage area on their way out of the room. Windows must be opened and no one may re-enter the room for at least 15 minutes. Any central heating or air-conditioning system should be shut down.

Take the relatively simple cleanup instructions for hard surfaces. Quoting from the EPA warning:

• Carefully scoop up glass pieces and powder using stiff paper or cardboard and place them in a glass jar with metal lid (such as a canning jar) or in a sealed plastic bag.
• Use sticky tape, such as duct tape, to pick up any remaining small glass fragments and powder.
• Wipe the area clean with damp paper towels or disposable wet wipes. Place towels in the glass jar or plastic bag.
• Do not use a vacuum or broom to clean up the broken bulb on hard surfaces.

More rules apply the next several times one cleans the area. Each time one vacuums the area again: open the windows and shut off any central heating or air-conditioning system. The windows should also remain open for at least 15 minutes after the vacuuming is completed.

It is not just customers who face risks. Undoubtedly many people will simply dispose of used compact fluorescent light bulbs in the trash. As John Skinner, executive director of the Solid Waste Association of North American, the group representing those who handle the trash, warned:

u201CThe problem with the bulbs is that they’ll break before they get to the landfill. They’ll break in containers, or they’ll break in a dumpster or they’ll break in the trucks. Workers may be exposed to very high levels of mercury when that happens.”

Even transporting your new unbroken light bulbs creates all sorts of problems. Warnings state that the bulbs be put in containers with tight-fitting lids and further suggesting the containers be filled with kitty litter around the bulbs to protect them from breaking due to sudden shocks. There is even the helpful suggestion that the container be labelled “Mercury — DO NOT OPEN.” Of course, you should transport these packages in a car trunk, but if you must keep them in the passenger compartment, make sure that it is well ventilated.

These are just some of the hassles to this latest “do good” regulation. Politicians place a premium on saving energy to the exclusion of saving people’s time, or, in this case, even their health.

When one looks at the problems with these bulbs, it becomes very understandable why people aren’t rushing to own them. Possibly people are a little smarter than the Democrat controlled congress that passed these rules.

John Lott [send him mail] is the author of Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t and The Bias Against Guns (Regnery 2003).

John Lott Archives

by John R. Lott, Jr. by John R. Lott, Jr.

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Philadelphia had 406 homicides in 2007, and, at 28 per 100,000 people, it also had the highest murder rate of any major city in the United States. No wonder Philadelphians want things done.

Recently, the city focused on a new tragedy, the murder of a 12-year police veteran and father of three, Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski, by three bank robbers with long, violent criminal records.

To Gov. Rendell, Mayor Nutter, Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, and freshman U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak, the solution is simple: more gun control. After pushes failed for new state and local laws, last Thursday these four politicians announced that the solution to Philadelphia’s problems was re-enacting the Federal Assault Weapons Ban.

They focused on the Chinese SKS rifle used to shoot Liczbinski five times. Rendell claims that "the only people who should have weapons like this is the police and the military." Some are calling the SKS an "assault weapon," although it is not so defined in any federal law and is not banned as such. And although the phrase assault weapon conjures up images of the rapid-fire machine guns used by the military, the SKS rifle is not a machine gun, instead functioning the same way as any semiautomatic hunting rifle. It fires a bullet similar to (indeed, slightly less powerful than) those fired from deer-hunting rifles, with the exact same rapidity.

This debate might make more sense if there were some evidence that the Federal Assault Weapons Ban lowered crime rates, but all the published academic studies by criminologists and economists find that neither the initial ban in 1994 nor its sun-setting in 2004 changed rates of murder or other violent crimes. Similarly, there is no evidence that state bans have mattered.

For example, a report for the National Institute of Justice by Christopher Koper, Daniel Woods and Jeffrey Roth at the University of Pennsylvania’s Jerry Lee Center of Criminology studied the first nine years of the federal ban and found that "we cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence. And, indeed, there has been no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence." They note that "the gun-ban provision targets a relatively small number of weapons based on outward features or accessories that have little to do with the weapons’ operation."

Even gun control groups realize that the presence or absence of such laws make little difference. Before the federal law sunset, a representative for the Violence Policy Center, a gun control group, said that "if the existing assault-weapons ban expires, I personally do not believe it will make one whit of difference one way or another in terms of our objective, which is reducing death and injury and getting a particularly lethal class of firearms off the streets." The center argued that the law involved only "minor changes in appearance."

Indeed, the U.S. murder rate was 5.7 per 100,000 people in 2003, the last full year before the law sunset. It was still 5.7 in 2006. Over the same period, the rate of violent crimes fell slightly. In the 43 states without their own assault-weapons bans, the murder rates fell, while they rose in the seven states with such bans. Violent-crime rates fell more quickly in the 43 without bans than in the seven states with them.

Yet it always seems easier for politicians to blame the lack of gun control rather than focusing on their own responsibilities. When Washington and Chicago experienced explosions in murder and violent crime after banning handguns, leaders there did not blame their bans, but rather they blamed the rest of the country that had not also adopted stricter regulations.

Ultimately, however, is it really surprising that Philadelphia’s murder rates have risen while its arrest rates have fallen?

Former state House Speaker John Perzel proposed a different approach (an approach Rendell opposes) to fix Philadelphia’s low and falling arrest rates. Perzel’s solution? Help Philadelphia hire more police.

If politicians are unwilling to spend more money on police or to make the police force work more effectively, there is another solution: Encourage law-abiding citizens to defend themselves. One possibility is to eliminate fees for poor law-abiding people, those who are the most vulnerable victims of crime, to obtain concealed-handgun permits. If the government isn’t going to protect people, why charge them for the opportunity to defend themselves? Research by David Mustard at the University of Georgia also found that more concealed-handgun permits reduce the number of criminals with guns and thus reduce violence against police officers.

Obsessing on gun control proposals distracts from doing what works. At some point it should be obvious to everyone, even politicians, that all the hype about "assault weapons" is just wrong.

This article was originally published by the Philadelphia Inquirer.

John Lott [send him mail] is the author of Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t and The Bias Against Guns (Regnery 2003).

John Lott Archives

by John R. Lott, Jr. by John R. Lott, Jr.

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Americans’ fears over the safety of schools continues.

Last Monday, three colleges and four K-to-12 schools were shut down by threats of violence.

This week over 25,000 college students at 300 chapters in 44 states belong to a group, Students for Concealed Carry on College Campuses, that will carry empty handgun holsters to protest their concerns about not being able to defend themselves.

With the first anniversary of the Virginia Tech attack last week and the discussions that it created, we clearly have not been able to put that and other attacks behind us. There are good reasons why the safety measures adopted over the last year to speed up response times or hiring more police haven’t eliminated the fear people feel.

The attack earlier this year at Northern Illinois University proved that even six minutes was too long. It took six minutes before the police were able to enter the classroom, and in that short time five people were murdered. Compared to the Virginia Tech and other attacks, six minutes is actually record-breaking speed, but it was simply not fast enough.

The Thursday before the NIU murders five people were killed in a city council chambers in Kirkwood, Mo. There was even a police officer already there when the attack occurred. But as happens time after time in these attacks, when uniformed police are there, the killers either wait for the police to leave the area or they are the first people killed. In Kirkwood, the police officer was killed immediately when the attack started. People cowered or were reduced to futilely throwing chairs at the killer.

There is a problem that people just are unwilling to recognize.

Just like attacks last year at the Westroads Mall in Omaha, Neb., or Trolley Square Mall in Salt Lake City or the recent attack at the Tinley Park Mall in Illinois or all the public schools attacks, all these cases had one thing in common: They took place in “gun free zones,” where private citizens were not allowed to carry their guns with them.

The malls in Omaha and Salt Lake City were in states that let people carry concealed handguns, but private property owners are allowed to post signs banning guns and those malls were among the few places in their states that chose to post such signs. In the Trolley Square attack an off-duty police officer fortunately violated the ban and stopped the attack. The attacks at Virginia Tech or the other public schools occurred in some of the few areas within their states that people are not allowed to carry concealed handguns.

It is not just recent killings that are occurring in these gun-free zones. Multiple-victim public shootings keep on occurring in places where guns are banned. Nor are these horrible incidents limited to just gun-free zones in the US.

In 1996 Martin Bryant killed 35 people at Port Arthur in Tasmania, Australia. In the last half-dozen years, European countries including France, Germany and Switzerland have experienced multiple-victim shootings. The worst school attack in Germany claimed 17 deaths, another 14 deaths; one attack in Switzerland claimed the lives of 14 regional legislators.

At some point you would think that something is going on here, that these murderers aren’t just picking their targets at random. Yet, when one thinks about it, this pattern isn’t really too surprising.

Most people understand that guns deter criminals. The problem is that instead of gun-free zones making it safe for potential victims, they make it safe for criminals.

Criminals are less likely to run into those who might be able to stop them. Everyone wants to keep guns away from criminals, but the problem is who is more likely to obey the law.

A student expelled for violating a gun-free zone at a college is extremely unlikely ever to get into another college. A faculty member fired for a firearms violation will find it virtually impossible to get another academic position. But even if the killer at Virginia Tech had lived, the notion that the threat of expulsion would have deterred the attacker when he would have already faced 32 death penalties or at least 32 life sentences seems silly.

Letting civilians have permitted concealed handguns limits the damage from attacks. A major factor in determining how many people are harmed by these killers is the amount of time that elapses between when the attack starts and when someone with a gun is able to arrive on the scene.

In cases from the church shooting in Colorado Springs, Colo., last December, where a parishioner who was given permission by the minister to carry her concealed gun into the church quickly stopped the murderer, to an attack last year in downtown Memphis, to the Appalachian Law School, to high schools in such places as Pearl, Miss., concealed handgun permit holders have stopped attacks well before uniformed police could possibly have arrived.

Twice this year armed Israeli citizens have stopped terrorist attacks at schools (once by an armed teacher and another by an armed student). Indeed, despite the fears being discussed about the risks of concealed handgun permit holders, I haven’t found one multiple-victim public shooting where a permit holder has accidentally shot a bystander.

With about 5 million Americans currently with concealed handgun permits in the U.S. and states starting having right-to-carry laws for as long as 80 years, we have a lot of experience with these laws, and one thing is very clear: Concealed handgun permit holders are extremely law-abiding and lose their permits for any gun-related violation at hundredths or thousandths of one percentage point. We also have a lot of experience with permitted concealed handguns in schools.

Prior to the 1995 Safe School Zone Act, states with right-to-carry laws let teachers or others carry concealed handguns at school, and several states still allow this today. And there is not a single instance that I or others have found where this produced a single problem. There are today even some universities, including large public universities such as Colorado State University and the University of Utah, that let students carry concealed handguns on school property.

With all the news media coverage of the types of guns used and how the criminal obtained the gun, at some point the news media might begin to mention the one common feature of these attacks: they keep occurring in gun-free zones.

Gun-free zones are a magnet for these attacks. But, even without the media, considering that 15 more states this year debated legislation to let concealed handguns on school campuses, possibly the issue is becoming clear anyway.

This article was originally published at Fox News.

John Lott [send him mail] is the author of Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t and The Bias Against Guns (Regnery 2003).

John Lott Archives

For gun control proponents and opponents a lot is riding on a former security guard for the Supreme Court Annex. Next Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments over whether the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns and its requirement that any rifles or shotguns remain locked violates the plaintiff’s, Dick Heller’s, constitutional rights.

Whatever the court decides, no one expects them to end gun control any more than the First Amendment’s u201Ccongress shall make no lawsu201D has prevented the passage of campaign finance regulations. The decision is likely to be limited to just whether a ban u201Cinfringedu201D on “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.”

If the DC ban is accepted by the court, it is hard to believe that any gun regulation will ever be struck down. If the court strikes it down, where the courts draw the line on what laws are considered u201Creasonableu201D regulations will take years to sort out.

Thus far the District of Columbia has spent a lot of time making a public policy case. Their argument in their brief to the court is pretty simple: u201Cbanning handguns saves lives.u201D

Yet, while it may seem obvious to many people that banning guns will save lives, that has not been DC’s experience.

The ban went into effect in early 1977, but since it started there is only one year (1985) when D.C.’s murder rate fell below what it was in 1976. But the murder rate also rose dramatically relative to other cities. In the 29 years we have data after the ban, DC’s murder rate ranked first or second among the largest 50 cities for 15 years. In another four years, it ranked fourth.

For Instance, D.C.’s murder rate fell 3.5 to 3 times more than Maryland and Virginia’s during the five years before the handgun ban went into effect in 1977 but rose 3.8 times more in the five years after it.

Was there something special about DC that kept the ban from working? Probably not, since bans have been causing crime to increase in other cities as well. DC cites the Chicago ban to support it’s own. Yet, before Chicago’s ban in 1982, its murder rate, which was falling from 27 to 22 per 100,000 in the five years, suddenly stopped falling and rose slightly to 23 per 100,000 in the five years afterwards.

Neither have bans worked in other countries. Gun crime in England and Wales increased 340 percent in the seven years since their 1998 ban. Ireland banned handguns and center fire rifles in 1972 and murder rates soared — the post-ban murder rate average has been 144 percent higher than pre-ban.

How could this be? DC officials say that the ban will disarm criminals. But who follows a ban and turns their guns in? Criminals who would be facing long prison sentences anyway if they were caught in a crime, or typically law-abiding citizens? By disarming normal people, a gun ban actually makes crime easier to commit.

Unfortunately, the Department of Justice has actually sided with D.C. in important parts of the case, and the court has granted Solicitor General Paul Clement 15 minutes to make his argument. While largely paying lip service to the Second Amendment being an u201Cindividual right,u201D the Department of Justice brief argues that an u201Cunquestionable threat to public safetyu201D from unregulated guns requires a lower standard must be adopted in defending it than is used to defend the rest of the Bill of Rights. But if they really believed that their evidence showed this, just as with the classic exception for the First Amendment of u201Cfalsely shouting fire in a theater,u201D it wouldn’t be necessary to threat the Second Amendment own brief arguing that the Second Amendment guarantees and individual right that is no different than freedom of speech.

The DOJ constitutional argument is similar to that of DC. It argues that since the government bans machine guns, it should also be able to ban handguns. And they claim that DC residents still retain a right to self-defense because the city doesn’t ban locked shotguns and rifles. Locks, they claim u201Ccan properly be interpretedu201D as not interfering with using guns for self-protection.

Factual errors underlie the rest of the argument — for in DC, rifles and shotguns become illegal as soon as they are unlocked. That means the city can prosecute anyone who uses one in self-defense, even if it was locked before the incident. Is that a u201Creasonableu201D restriction on self-defense? Gunlock requirements are also associated with not banned.

It makes sense that the DOJ is backing the ban, given that it would lose regulatory power if it were struck down. As the DOJ lawyers note in the brief, striking down this ban could u201Ccast doubt on the constitutionality of existing federal legislation.u201D

The Department of Justice and D.C. politicians can talk all they want about how necessary handgun bans are to ensure public safety and the u201Creasonablenessu201D of the restrictions. But hopefully the Supreme Court will see past that. At some point, hard facts must matter. This is one point where public safety and individual rights coincide.

This article was originally published at Fox News.

John Lott [send him mail] is the author of Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t and The Bias Against Guns (Regnery 2003). Maxim Lott is a junior at the College of William & Mary.

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by John R. Lott, Jr. by John R. Lott, Jr.

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John McCain, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton all promise massive new regulations that will cost trillions of dollars to combat global warming. John McCain says that it will be his first task if he wins the presidency. After consulting with Al Gore, Barack Obama feels that the problem is so imminent that it is not even really possible to wait until he becomes president.

Ironically, this political unanimity is occurring as global temperatures have been cooling dramatically over the last decade. Global temperatures have now largely eliminated most of the one degree Celsius warming that had previously occurred over the last 100 years. Hundreds of climate scientists have warned that there is not significant man-made global warming.

A conference in New York on Monday and Tuesday this week will bring 100 scientists together to warn that the there is no man-made global warming crisis.

Yet, we just keep on piling on more and more regulations without asking hard questions about whether they are justified.

New mileage per gallon regulations were signed into law last year that will mandate that cars get 35 MPG. The rules will make us poorer, forcing people to buy products that aren’t otherwise the best suited for them. More people will die because lighter cars are less safe, but we are told this is all worth it largely because of global warming.

But much of what gets passed is arbitrary. Was there anything scientific about picking 35 MPG instead of, say, 30 MPG other than the desire to do more? And how do these regulations fit in with all the gasoline taxes we have that are already reducing gas use?

To see if all this makes any sense there are really four questions that all have to be answered “yes.”

1) Are global temperatures rising? Surely, they were rising from the late 1970s to 1998, but “there has been no net global warming since 1998.” Indeed, the more recent numbers show that there is now evidence of significant cooling.

2) But supposing that the answer to the first question is “yes,” is mankind responsible for a significant and noticeable portion of an increase in temperatures? Mankind is responsible for just a few percent of greenhouse gases, and greenhouse gases are not responsible for most of what causes warming (e.g., the Sun).

Over 100 leading climate scientists from around the world signed a letter in December stating: “significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming.” In December a list was also released of another 400 scientists who questioned the general notion of significant manmade global warming.

3) If the answer to both preceding questions is “yes,” is an increase temperature changes “bad”? That answer is hardly obvious. Higher temperatures could increase ocean levels by between seven inches and two feet over the next 100 years.

Although some blame global warming for seemingly everything, according to others higher temperatures will increase the amount of land that we can use to grow food, it will improve people’s health, and increase biological diversity. Even the UN says that a mild increase in temperature would be good for many regions of the globe.

4) Finally, let’s assume that the answer to all three previous questions is “yes.” Does that mean we need more regulations and taxes? No, that is still not clear.

If we believe that man-made global warming is u201Cbad,u201D we still don’t want to eliminate all carbon emissions. Having no cars, no air conditioning, or no electricity would presumably be much worse than anything people are claiming from global warming.

You want to pick a tax that just discourages carbon emissions to the point where the cost of global warming is greater than that of cutting emissions.

Too little of a tax can be u201Cbadu201D because we would produce greenhouse gases when their costs were greater than the benefits. But too much of a tax also makes us poorer because we won’t be getting the benefits from cars or electricity even when the benefits exceed the costs that they would produce from global warming.

What is often ignored in the debate over global warming is that we already have very substantial taxes on gasoline, averaging 46 cents per gallon in the US. Even if one believes that gasoline use should be restricted to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the question is whether our taxes are already restricting use “too much” or “not enough.u201D But simply saying that carbon dioxide emissions are bad isn’t enough.

In fact, William Nordhaus, an economics professor at Yale and former member of President Carter’s Council of Economic Advisors, puts the u201Crightu201D level of gasoline taxes at around 10 cents a gallon today, reaching 16 cents per gallon in 2015. Nordhaus’ analysis assumes that the answers to the first three questions are u201Cyes.u201D If anything, while gasoline taxes are partially used for such things as building roads, it seems quite plausible that, even accepting Nordhaus’ assumptions, current gasoline taxes are much too high to deal with the harm from global warming.

However good the intentions, the debate over global warming is much more complicated than simply saying that the world is getting warmer. It is too bad that these questions won’t be getting a real debate this election. The irony is that those who sell themselves as being so caring aren’t careful enough to investigate the impact of their regulations.

This article was originally published at Fox News.

John Lott [send him mail] is the author of Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t and The Bias Against Guns (Regnery 2003).

by John R. Lott, Jr. by John R. Lott, Jr.

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A lot of Americans who believe in the right to own guns were very disappointed this weekend. On Friday, the Bush administration’s Justice Department entered into the fray over the District of Columbia’s 1976 handgun ban by filing a brief to the Supreme Court that effectively supports the ban. The administration pays lip service to the notion that the Second Amendment protects gun ownership as an “individual right,” but their brief leaves the term essentially meaningless.

Quotes by the two sides’ lawyers say it all. The District’s acting attorney general, Peter Nickles, happily noted that the Justice Department’s brief was a “somewhat surprising and very favorable development.” Alan Gura, the attorney who will be representing those challenging the ban before the Supreme Court, accused the Bush administration of “basically siding with the District of Columbia” and said that “This is definitely hostile to our position.” As the lead to an article in the Los Angeles Times said Sunday, “gun-control advocates never expected to get a boost from the Bush administration.”

As probably the most prominent Second Amendment law professor in the country privately confided in me, “If the Supreme Court accepts the solicitor general’s interpretation, the chances of getting the D.C. gun ban struck down are bleak.”

The Department of Justice argument can be boiled down pretty easily. Its lawyers claim that since the government bans machine guns, it should also be able to ban handguns. After all, they reason, people can still own rifles and shotguns for protection, even if they have to be stored locked up. The Justice Department even seems to accept that trigger locks are not really that much of a burden, and that the locks “can properly be interpreted” as not interfering with using guns for self-protection. Yet, even if gun locks do interfere with self-defense, DOJ believes the regulations should be allowed, as long as the District of Columbia government thinks it has a good reason.

Factually, there are many mistakes in the DOJ’s reasoning: As soon as a rifle or shotgun is unlocked, it becomes illegal in D.C., and there has never been a federal ban on machine guns. But these are relatively minor points. Nor does it really matter that the only academic research on the impact of trigger locks on crime finds that states that require guns be locked up and unloaded face a five-percent increase in murder and a 12-percent increase in rape. Criminals are more likely to attack people in their homes, and those attacks are more likely to be successful. Since the potential of armed victims deters criminals, storing a gun locked and unloaded actually encourages crime.

The biggest problem is the standard used for evaluating the constitutionality of regulations. The DOJ is asking that a different, much weaker standard be used for the Second Amendment than the courts demands for other “individual rights” such as speech, unreasonable searches and seizures, imprisonment without trial, and drawing and quartering people.

If one accepts the notion that gun ownership is an individual right, what does “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” mean? What would the drafters of the Bill of Rights have had to write if they really meant the right “shall not be infringed”? Does the phrase “the right of the people” provide a different level of protection in the Second Amendment than in the First and Fourth?

But the total elimination of gun control is not under consideration by the Supreme Court. The question is what constitutes “reasonable” regulation. The DOJ brief argues that if the DC government says gun control is important for public safety, it should be allowed by the courts. What the appeals court argued is that gun regulations not only need to be reasonable, they need to withstand “strict scrutiny” — a test that ensures the regulations are narrowly tailored to achieve the desired goal.

Perhaps the Justice Department’s position isn’t too surprising. Like any other government agency, it has a hard time giving up its authority. The Justice Department’s bias can been seen in that it finds it necessary to raise the specter of machine guns 10 times when evaluating a law that bans handguns. Nor does the brief even acknowledge that after the ban, D.C.’s murder rate only once fell below what it was in 1976.

Worried about the possibility that a Supreme Court decision supporting the Second Amendment as an individual right could “cast doubt on the constitutionality of existing federal legislation,” the Department of Justice felt it necessary to head off any restrictions on government power right at the beginning.

But all is not lost. The Supreme Court can of course ignore the Bush administration’s advice, but the brief does carry significant weight. President Bush has the power to fix this by ordering that the solicitor general brief be withdrawn or significantly amended. Unfortunately, it may take an uprising by voters to rein in the Justice Department.

This article was originally published at National Review Online.

John Lott [send him mail] is the author of Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t and The Bias Against Guns (Regnery 2003).

by John R. Lott, Jr. by John R. Lott, Jr.

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Should your doctor ask your child if you own a gun?

Guidelines issued by the American Academy of Pediatric say “yes.”

They warn that u201CChildren are curious even if they’ve had some sort of firearm training. That’s why parents taking responsibility for safe gun storage is so essential.u201D

Doctors across the United States are being advised to interrogate children about mom and dad’s “bad” behavior.

It sounds simple enough, but the problem is that the advice ignores the benefits and exaggerates the costs of gun ownership.

Take a recent example from Massachusetts that was discussed in the Boston Herald:

“Debbie is a mom from Uxbridge who was in the examination room when the pediatrician asked her 5-year-old, ‘Does Daddy own a gun?’

“When the little girl said yes, the doctor began grilling her and her mom about the number and type of guns, how they are stored, etc.

“If the incident had ended there, it would have merely been annoying.

“But when a friend in law enforcement let Debbie know that her doctor had filed a report with the police about her family’s (entirely legal) gun ownership, she got mad.”

Perhaps it was only a matter of time. Accidental gun deaths involving children get national coverage. News programs stage experiments with 5- and 6-year-olds in a room filled with toys and a gun. Shocking pictures show the children picking up the gun and playing with it like a toy. For years, the Clinton administration would show public service ads with the voices or pictures of young children between the ages of 3 and 7 implying an epidemic of accidental gun deaths involving children.

With all this attention, the fear is understandable, but it is still irresponsible. Convincing patients not to own guns or to at least lock them up will cost more lives than it will save. It also gives a misleading impression of what poses the greatest dangers to children.

Accidental gun deaths among children are fortunately much rarer than most people believe. Consider the following numbers.

In 2003, for the United States, the Centers for Disease Control reports that 28 children under age 10 died from accidental shots. With some 90 million gun owners and about 40 million children under 10, it is hard to find any item as commonly owned in American homes, as potentially as lethal, that has as low of an accidental death rate.

These deaths also have little to do with “naturally curious” children shooting other children. From 1995 to 2001 only about nine of these accidental gun deaths each year involve a child under 10 shooting another child or themselves. Overwhelmingly, the shooters are adult males with long histories of alcoholism, arrests for violent crimes, automobile crashes, and suspended or revoked driver’s licenses.

Even if gun locks can stop the few children who abuse a gun from doing so, gun locks cannot stop adults from firing their own gun. It makes a lot more sense for doctors to ask if “daddy” has a violent criminal record or a history of substance abuse, rather than ask if they own a gun.

Fear about guns also seems greatest among those who know the least about them.

For example, those unfamiliar with guns don’t realize that most young children simply couldn’t fire your typical semi-automatic pistol. Even the few who posses the strength to pull back the slide on the gun are unlikely to know that they must do that to put the bullet in the chamber or that they need to switch off the safety.

With so many greater dangers facing children everyday from common household items, it is not obvious why guns have been singled out. Here are some of the other ways that children under 10 died in 2004.

Over 1,400 children were killed by cars, almost 260 of those deaths were young pedestrians. Bicycle and space heater accidents take many times more children’s lives than guns. Over 90 drowned in bathtubs. The most recent yearly data available indicates that over 30 children under age 5 drowned in five-gallon plastic water buckets.

Yet, the real problem with this gun phobia is that without guns, victims are much more vulnerable to criminal attack. Guns are used defensively some 2 million times each year. Even though the police are extremely important in reducing crime, they simply can’t be there all the time and virtually always arrive after the crime has been committed. Having a gun is by far the safest course of action when one is confronted by a criminal.

The cases where young children use guns to save their family’s lives rarely makes the news. Recent examples where children’s lives were clearly lost because guns were locked and inaccessible are ignored.

Recent research that I did examining juvenile accidental gun deaths for all U.S. states from 1977 to 1998, found that sixteen states mandating that guns be locked up had no impact. What did happen, however, was that criminals were emboldened to attack people in their homes and crimes were more successful; 300 more murders and 4,000 more rapes occurred each year in these states. Burglaries also rose dramatically. The evidence also indicates that states with the biggest increases in gun ownership have had the biggest drops in violent crime.

Asking patients about guns not only strains doctor patient relationships, it exaggerates the dangers and risks lives. Yet, in the end, possibly some good can come out of all this gun phobia. If your doctors ask you whether you own a gun, rather than sarcastically asking them if they own a space heater, why not offer to go out to a shooting range together and teach them about guns?

This article was originally published at Fox News.

John Lott [send him mail] is the author of Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t and The Bias Against Guns (Regnery 2003).

by John R. Lott, Jr. by John R. Lott, Jr.

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Rudy Giuliani had a monumental task last Friday. Going before the NRA, Giuliani wanted to alleviate gun owners’ fears that he would take away their ability to use guns to defend themselves.

Some media suggested an even more lofty goal: u201Cit is possible that the NRA would endorse Giuliani.u201D

Surely Giuliani said many comforting things. He talked about the Second Amendment protecting individual rights. And he now disavows the lawsuits against the gun makers — something that he himself initiated, but that he says went off course and went in directions with which he disagreed.

For good measure, Giuliani also invoked his time in the Reagan Justice Department a quarter of a century ago and Reagan’s defense of gun rights as evidence of his own support.

For many, the bottom line is, as the New York Times claimed, “that he opposes new restrictions on gun ownership.”

The Boston Globe interpreted Giuliani as pledging “he would punish gun-toting criminals harshly while leaving law-abiding gun owners alone.”

But this is the same Giuliani who six years ago supported Federal gun licensing and seven years ago said that 86 to 88 percent of the guns sold in the United States should not be sold because gun makers “would have to know that they are supplying an illegal market.” This is the same person who sued gun makers so that the city could recoup its costs of dealing with crime, that openly broke with the Reagan administration during congressional testimony on a gun control bill.

Some of those present at the NRA meeting were moved by Giuliani’s comments. Giuliani apparently had at least neutralized their concerns. Yet, a careful reading of Giuliani’s speech finds it filled with caveats.

Take his answer to a question about gun control:

“My position is the law should be left the way it is now. Given the level of crime in this country, I think the emphasis and the energy should be spent on enforcing the laws that presently exist, and if changes in the law are necessary later, that’ll respond to other social conditions.

“I think the single most important thing that the next president has to do is to organize an effort in the Department of Justice and with state and local law enforcement to work in a cooperative way to enforce the laws that presently exist. After we do that, and we see the impact of that, then we can take a look at whether new laws are necessary; they may or may not be. ”

“Given the level of crime in this country?” Would his position change if crime increased? It would certainly seem so. Surely Giuliani has frequently claimed that gun control reduces crime. Indeed, he has claimed that most of the reduction in New York City’s crime rate during the 1990s was due to gun control: “the single biggest connection between violent crime and an increase in violent crime is the presence of guns in your society…the more guns you take out of society, the more you are going to reduce murder. The less guns you take out of society, the more it is going to go up.”

Giuliani is justifiably proud of New York City’s dramatic reductions in violent crime during the 1990s, but his claim that “the single biggest” factor was taking guns off the street is weak, to say the least. There is no academic research by economists or criminologists that indicates that gun control mattered at all.

There are other more obvious explanations, especially the massive increase in full-time sworn police officers. The number grew from 26,844 in 1990 to 39,779 by 2000, roughly five times faster than in other big cities. New York City also improved its police department by raising hiring standards and increasing officer pay,

What about Giuliani’s statement, “After we do that . . . we can take a look at whether new laws are necessary"? The only restriction that this implies is that the Federal and state governments must first do what they can to reduce crime. After that, all restrictions are off.

Giuliani’s statement on lawsuits against gun makers is no more comforting. He now disavows the lawsuits because of “twists and turns I disagree with.” But there is absolutely no mention about what these changes were. His own statements, when originally announcing New York City’s lawsuit, contained a laundry list of complaints. Indeed, his claims seemed the same as those in other city lawsuits.

Possibly, Giuliani’s opinions on the Second Amendment were really affected by Judge Laurence Silberman’s recent court decision striking down Washington D.C.’s gun ban. Silberman did make a persuasive case that the Second Amendment does guarantee an individual right. But Giuliani has frequently pointed out that constitutionally protected rights still allow u201Creasonableu201D regulations to accomplish some other goal, such as public safety.

Despite the assurances of the press, Giuliani clearly did not say that he would oppose new gun laws. Compared to what conservatives call the u201Cjust about flawless performanceu201D by Fred Thompson, Giuliani’s presentation just didn’t cut it.

With the nation at war, Republicans possibly have more important things to care about than gun control. But Giuliani’s image as a straight shooter risks being damaged by all the bobbing and weaving that he is doing over gun control.

This article was originally published at Fox News.

John Lott [send him mail] is the author of Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t and The Bias Against Guns (Regnery 2003).

by John R. Lott, Jr. by John R. Lott, Jr.

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In asking the Supreme Court to let the District of Columbia ban handguns, the city has a simple argument: Whatever one thinks of the Second Amendment, banning handguns is a “reasonable regulation” to protect public safety. The problem for the city is that anyone who can look up the crime numbers will see that D.C.’s violent crime rate went up, not down, after the ban.

D.C. notes that criminals like to use handguns to commit crimes. We all want to disarm criminals, but, as long as one recognizes the possibility of self-defense, at best the city’s claim can only be part of the story. As with all gun-control laws, the question is ultimately whether it is the law-abiding citizens or criminals who are most likely to obey the law. If law-abiding citizens are the ones who turn in their guns and not the criminals, crime rates can go up, not down.

The city’s brief focuses only on murder rates in discussing crime in D.C. Yet, in the five years before Washington’s ban in 1976, the murder rate fell from 37 to 27 per 100,000. In the five years after it went into effect, the murder rate rose back up to 35. But there is one fact that seems particularly hard to ignore. D.C.’s murder rate fluctuated after 1976 but has only once fallen below what it was in 1976 (that happened years later, in 1985). Does D.C. really want to argue that the gun ban reduced the murder rate?

Similarly for violent crime, from 1977 to 2003, there were only two years when D.C.’s violent crime rate fell below the rate in 1976. These drops and subsequent increases were much larger than any changes in neighboring Maryland and Virginia. For example, D.C.’s murder rate fell 3.5 to 3 times more than in the neighboring states during the five years before the ban and rose back 3.8 times more in the five years after it. D.C.’s murder rate also rose relative to that in other similarly sized cities.

Surely D.C. has had many problems that contribute to crime, but even cities with far better police departments have seen crime soar in the wake of handgun bans. Chicago has banned all handguns since 1982. Indeed, D.C. points to Chicago’s ban to support its own ban. But the gun ban didn’t work at all when it came to reducing violence. Chicago’s murder rate fell from 27 to 22 per 100,000 in the five years before the law and then rose slightly to 23. The change is even more dramatic when compared to five neighboring Illinois counties: Chicago’s murder rate fell from being 8.1 times greater than its neighbors in 1977 to 5.5 times in 1982, and then went way up to 12 times greater in 1987.

Taking a page from recent Supreme Court cases, D.C. points to gun bans in other countries as evidence that others think that gun bans are desirable. But the experience in other countries, even island nations that have gone so far as banning guns and where borders are easy to monitor, should give D.C. and its supporters some pause. Not only didn’t violent crime and homicide decline as promised, but they actually increased.

D.C.’s brief specifically points to Great Britain’s handgun ban in January 1997. But the number of deaths and injuries from gun crime in England and Wales increased 340 percent in the seven years from 1998 to 2005. The rates of serious violent crime, armed robberies, rapes and homicide have also soared.

The Republic of Ireland banned and confiscated all handguns and all center fire rifles in 1972, but murder rates rose fivefold by 1974 and in the 20 years after the ban has averaged 114 percent higher than the pre-ban rate (never falling below at least 31 percent higher).

Jamaica banned all guns in 1974, but murder rates almost doubled from 11.5 per 100,000 in 1973 to 19.5 in 1977, and soared further to 41.7 in 1980.

Evidence is also available for other countries. For example, it is hard to think of a much more draconian police state than the former Soviet Union. Yet despite a ban on guns that dated back to the Communist revolution, its murder rates were high. During the entire decade from 1976 to 1985 the Soviet Union’s homicide rate was between 21 and 41 percent higher than that of the United States. By 1989, two years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, it had risen to 48 percent above the U.S. rate.

Even if D.C.’s politicians want to keep arguing for a ban based on public safety, hard facts must eventually matter. If they can’t see that gun-control laws have failed to deliver as promised, maybe the Supreme Court can point it out for them.

This article was originally published in the September 7 Washington Times.

John Lott [send him mail] is the author of Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t and The Bias Against Guns (Regnery 2003).

by John R. Lott, Jr. and Sonya D. Jones by John R. Lott, Jr. and Sonya D. Jones

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Is a salmon born in a hatchery a different species from the same salmon born in the wild?

It is hard to believe, but recent Federal court rulings are claiming that otherwise genetically identical fish are separate species, forcing an appeal being announced recently to the 9th Circuit Court.

Two court decisions in the last two months show how much is at stake in these questions. In mid-June, Judge John C. Coughenour, of the Western District of Washington, ruled that "human interference" and the "unnatural" way that hatcheries maintain salmon populations was unlawful. The judge then ordered that the Upper Columbia River steelhead remain on the endangered species list.

Just this month, Judge Michael Hogan in Eugene reached a similar conclusion. After Hogan’s decision, an attorney for the environmental group Earthjustice said "The debate over hatchery fish should be considered [in counting the number of salmon is] conclusively over."

These decisions will dramatically affect a lot of people living in the Pacific Northwest. Protecting the salmon will make water much more difficult to obtain, and, without irrigation permits, many farmers and ranchers will have to stop watering their crops and livestock. Large areas of private property will have to be set aside for any species listed as threatened or endangered. The commercial and recreational fishing industries in the Northwest, which generate more than $2 billion annually, will also be affected.

Promoting the survival of salmon is a worthy goal, but does it really matter if a fish’s ancestors are from a hatchery or are naturally spawned? As it is, many so-called "wild" or naturally spawned salmon were all but gone and brought back through the use of hatcheries. Given that hatcheries have been around for over a hundred years, it’s likely that all naturally spawned salmon have at least some hatchery-spawned ancestors.

But whatever one’s objections to the Endangered Species Act, its purpose is pretty clear: "to provide a program for the conservation of . . . endangered and threatened species." But how do you define hatchery and naturally spawned fish as different species? There are no biological or genetic differences. The only way you can tell the fish apart is the clipped fin on hatchery fish.

Environmental groups claim that some hatchery fish behave differently, but that is hard to take seriously. Why ignore all hatchery fish just because some behave differently?

Think where that logic ultimately leads. By defining different species based on behavior and not genetics, how many different species of humans do you think that there would be? It’s kind of like differentiating species of humans based on whether you were born in a hospital or at home.

The claimed distinction largely stems from hatchery and natural fish survival rates. Hatchery fish have a higher survival rate from egg to smolt, but a lower survival rate from smolt to adult. Yet, that is hardly surprising. Many of the weaker naturally spawned fish have died off as hatchlings, leaving fewer of them to die off in the next stage.

Over the years, the government’s policies have lurched from one extreme to another. Ironically, while the courts are today asking if the salmon are endangered, just nine years ago the state of Oregon ordered mass killings of salmon to dry up the food supply for predatory sea lions in an attempt to drive them away from dams. The eggs from those salmon were shipped to hatcheries in South America and the dead fish sent to canneries. Private land owners are now facing the brunt of these costly government mistakes from the past.

These two court cases highlight the importance of balanced environmental policies. But if you are going to adopt policies that so severely impact farming and ranching, then those policies should actually accomplish something.

John Lott [send him mail] is the author of Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t and The Bias Against Guns (Regnery 2003). Sonya D. Jones, an attorney for the Pacific Legal Foundation, is representing the appellants in Judge Coughenour’s decision.

by John R. Lott Jr. by John R. Lott Jr.

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If you have ever thought of buying a new car, you are undoubtedly familiar with the claim that as soon as you drive the new car off the showroom floor its price falls dramatically. Recent popular books have asserted that simply driving a new car off the lot reduces the price by 25 percent.

Many economists explain this drop as occurring because the people who are trying to resell their cars quickly are typically doing so to get rid of “lemons.” Even if your virtually new car isn’t a lemon, people who want to buy your car can’t be sure, so they aren’t willing to pay as much as your virtually new non-lemon car is really worth. It is the classic story of “market failure.”

Nice story — except it’s wrong. In fact, the widespread perception that a new car loses substantial value as soon as a buyer drives it off the lot is really just a myth, as we shall see.

But when anomalies occur like the lemon problem, they inevitably create a financial incentive for someone to solve them. Suppose you buy a car for $20,000 and decide for whatever reason to resell it quickly. Assuming nothing is wrong with the car, you have a $20,000 car with just a few miles on it, but according to authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, you can only sell it for $15,000 because buyers believe that people only try to sell a new car so quickly when there’s something seriously wrong with it.

What do you do? Do you really sell the car for a $5,000 loss?

The real question is: can you convince someone for less than $5,000 that there is nothing wrong with your car? Could you hire your local mechanic or the car’s original manufacturer to inspect the car and certify that there is nothing wrong with it? If you could do this for $500 and tell potential buyers about the certification in your advertisements, you could likely sell the car for the full $20,000, earning for yourself $19,500 — not $15,000.

In fact, there are many possible solutions. For example, a person worried about buying a lemon can buy a certified pre-owned car. Car manufacturers also allow warrantees to be transferred to new owners. Whether the warrantee is for three years/36,000 miles or five years/60,000 miles, a person who buys a lemon will not be stuck with it, even if he is the second owner.

Furthermore, some places allow you to return a used car for a full refund. For instance, CarSense, a certified used car dealer in the Philadelphia area, offers full refunds for cars returned within five days of purchase. And of course, these resale companies want to maintain a reputation for screening out any problematic cars.

Luckily for us, the lemon thesis can be easily tested. Last year I analyzed the prices of used cars — all 2006 models — in the Philadelphia area, comparing the manufacturers’ suggested retail price (MSRP) when new with the certified used price and the Kelly Bluebook price. The Kelly Bluebook price “reflects a vehicle’s actual selling price and is based on tens of thousands of recent real sales transactions from auto dealers across the United States.”

I looked at used cars that were less than a year old, all with about 15,000 miles. These were chosen to define what used cars sell for when they are about a year old. Additional used cars were looked at that had less than 5,000 miles on them, averaging 3,340 miles.

One thing immediately became clear: used cars with only a few thousand miles on them sell for almost the same price as when new. The certified used car price was on average just three percent less than the new car MSRP, and actually three percent higher than the new car Bluebook prices. The Kelly Bluebook further indicates that the private-transaction used car price was only four percent less than the new car Bluebook prices.

One explanation for such a small drop on private transactions — in which buyers can’t even rely on a brand name dealer’s certification — is that manufacturer warrantees still protect buyers.

I called Kelly Bluebook to check if the sample I had was representative and was told that a study of all the cars in their sample would have yielded a similar result; there is surely no large drop in a car’s price as soon as you drive it off the lot.

Even more damning, the price of these virtually new cars occasionally rises even above the MSRP. The Kelly Bluebook representatives claim that in order to maintain strong resale price values and prevent customers from feeling as if the dealer is taking advantage of them, manufacturers often ensure that dealers cannot sell their cars — even the most popular models — at more than the MSRP.

If the lemon thesis had been correct and the seller would do well to wait a year to sell it, then used cars that are about a year old should not sell for much less than those with only a few thousand miles on them. But, indeed, these older cars do sell for a lot less. The certified used car price for these older cars was 14 percent lower than the new car MSRP and eight percent lower than the new car Bluebook prices.

It is easy to claim “market failure,” that information isn’t perfect and that imperfect information prevents transactions from taking place. Of course, saying that markets fail because information is costly makes as much sense as saying that markets fail because steel is costly. But making trades possible also means profits, and markets are incredibly good at fixing “problems” when there are profits to be made.

John Lott [send him mail] is the author of Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t and The Bias Against Guns (Regnery 2003).

by John R. Lott Jr. and Maxim C. Lott by John R. Lott Jr. and Maxim C. Lott

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When Mayor Street spent 15 hours waiting in line for an iPhone recently, the city was not impressed by his love of new technology. Rather, Street had to answer to a passerby asking, "How can you sit here with 200 murders in the city already?"

Local politicians say they know the source of the problem: the lack of gun control. Gov. Rendell recently complained the state legislature "has been in the control of the NRA." Street blames the increasing murder rate on "the dangerous proliferation of guns on our city streets." Last Tuesday, two City Council members announced the novel legal tactic of suing the state government to let Philadelphia pass its own gun laws.

The desire "to do something" is understandable, but new gun laws aren’t the answer.

In the five years from 2001 to 2006, Philadelphia’s murder rate soared more than 36 percent while nationally, the murder rate increased only 2 percent. Indeed, only two other cities in the top 40 experienced a sharper rise in murder rates, according to FBI crime statistics.

But if the cause of more murders in Philadelphia is the lack of yet more gun control, why isn’t murder increasing in the rest of Pennsylvania? Pittsburgh saw just a 7 percent increase.

Why haven’t murder rates gone up in the rest of the country? Should Phoenix, the city closest in size to Philadelphia, claim that its murder rate remained virtually unchanged for the last five years because of the supposed lack of new gun control? How should Dallas explain its 24 percent drop in murder?

It is not that guns are more likely to be used in Philadelphia murders, either. The proportion of murders involving guns is similar to that of other cities.

It would appear that Philadelphia’s problems have something to do with Philadelphia, not the lack of more gun control coming out of Washington or Harrisburg.

Could it be that Philadelphia simply isn’t doing such a great job at law enforcement? Since 2001, Philadelphia’s arrest rate for murder has fallen by 20 percent, according to the Pennsylvania Uniform Crime Reporting System. Nationally, and among cities with more than 250,000 people, arrest rates have remained virtually unchanged. It isn’t so surprising that Philly’s murder rate has gone up more than in other cities. After all, criminals are getting away with murder in Philadelphia.

Sure, Philadelphia has slightly fewer police than it had in 2001, but that drop is no different from the small drop that has occurred nationally. What is different is that Philadelphia has experienced a significant drop in arrests per officer relative to the rest of the country.

But it is not just a problem of police. The city is seeing lower conviction rates, and it is not keeping criminals in jail for very long. One could make up for this difference by hiring more police — research has shown the number of police officers to be the main factor in reducing crime. But Philadelphia’s problem is how it uses the police it has.

Pointing to more gun-control laws as the solution is simply a way for politicians to pass the blame. Besides, such proposals offer little hope for actually reducing the murder rate. They’ve all been tried before, from one-gun-a-month limits and reporting stolen guns to the ultimate catchall — letting Philadelphia pass its own gun laws again.

Take the law that seems to be Rendell’s favorite: the one-gun-a-month purchase rule. It would reduce the number of gun shows in the state by about 25 percent and shut some stores. But since just a fraction of one percent of criminals with guns get their weapons at gun shows, there would be few benefits from those restrictions. Collectors or those who might legitimately want to get more than one gun at a time are the ones who are inconvenienced. In fact, no published academic study by criminologists or economists shows that such limits reduce violent crime.

The sooner local politicians stop playing politics in the state Capitol and realize that the problem lies in the city’s low rate of solving crimes, the sooner the problem will be under control. After all, Philadelphia’s current gun laws are similar to those of many others around the country.

What is not the same? In Philadelphia, criminals are less likely to answer for their crimes.

This article was originally published Tuesday, July 17, 2007, in the Philadelphia Inquirer and is reprinted with permission of the author.

John Lott [send him mail] is the author of Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t and The Bias Against Guns (Regnery 2003). Maxim Lott is an intern at ABC News.

by John R. Lott, Jr. by John R. Lott, Jr.

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The abortion debate usually centers on the morality of the act itself. But liberalizing abortion rules from 1969 to 1973 ignited vast social changes in America. With the perennial political debate over abortion again consuming the presidential campaign and the Supreme Court, it might be time to evaluate what Roe v. Wade has meant in practical terms.

One often misunderstood fact: Legal abortions just didn’t start with Roe, or even with the five states that liberalized abortion laws in 1969 and 1970. Prior to Roe, women could have abortions when their lives or health were endangered. Doctors in some states, such as Kansas, had very liberal interpretations of what constituted danger to health. Nevertheless, Roe did substantially increase abortions, more than doubling the rate per live birth in the five years from 1972 to 1977. But many other changes occurred at the same time:

• A sharp increase in pre-marital sex.
• A sharp rise in out-of-wedlock births.
• A drop in the number of children placed for adoption.
• A decline in marriages that occur after the woman is pregnant.

Some of this might seem contradictory. Why would both the number of abortions and of out-of-wedlock births go up? If there were more illegitimate births, why were fewer children available for adoption?

As to the first puzzle, part of the answer lies in attitudes to premarital sex. With abortion seen as a backup, women as well as men became less careful in using contraceptives as well as more likely to have premarital sex. There were more unplanned pregnancies. But legal abortion did not mean every unplanned pregnancy led to abortion. After all, just because abortion is legal, does not mean that the decision is an easy one.

Many academic studies have shown that legalized abortion, by encouraging premarital sex, increased the number of unplanned births, even outweighing the reduction in unplanned births due to abortion. In the United States from the early 1970s, when abortion was liberalized, through the late 1980s, there was a tremendous increase in the rate of out-of-wedlock births, rising from an average of 5% of all births in 1965—69 to more than 16% two decades later (1985—1989). For blacks, the numbers soared from 35% to 62%. While not all of this rise can be attributed to liberalized abortion rules, it was nevertheless a key contributing factor.

With legalization and women not forced to go through with an unplanned pregnancy, a man might well expect his partner to have an abortion if a sexual encounter results in an unplanned pregnancy. But what happens if the woman refuses? Maybe she is morally opposed to abortion; or perhaps she thought she could have an abortion, but upon becoming pregnant, she decides that she can’t go through with it. What happens then?

Many men, feeling tricked into unwanted fatherhood, will likely wash their hands of the affair altogether, thinking, "I never wanted a baby. It’s her choice, so let her raise the baby herself." What is expected of men in this position has changed dramatically in the last four decades. The evidence shows that the greater availability of abortion largely ended "shotgun" marriages, where men felt obligated to marrying the woman.

What has happened to these babies of reluctant fathers? The mothers often end up raising the child on their own. Even as abortion has led to more out-of-wedlock births, it has also dramatically reduced adoptions of children born in America by two-parent families. Before Roe, when abortion was much more difficult, women who would have chosen an abortion but were unable to get one turned to adoption as their backup. After Roe, women who turned down an abortion were also the type who wanted to keep the child.

But all these changes — rising out-of-wedlock births, plummeting adoption rates, and the end of shotgun marriages — meant one thing: more single parent families. With work and other demands on their time, single parents, no matter how "wanted" their child may be, tend to devote less attention to their children than do married couples; after all, it’s difficult for one person to spend as much time with a child as two people can.

From the beginning of the abortion debate, those favoring abortion have pointed to the social costs of "unwanted" children who simply won’t get the attention of "wanted" ones. But there is a trade-off that has long been neglected. Abortion may eliminate "unwanted" children, but it increases out-of-wedlock births and single parenthood. Unfortunately, the social consequences of illegitimacy dominated.

Children born after liberalized abortion rules have suffered a series of problems, from problems at school to more crime. The saddest fact is that it is the most vulnerable in society, poor blacks, who have suffered the most from these changes.

Liberalized abortion might have made life easier for many, but like sex itself sometimes, it has had many unintended consequences.

This article was originally published Tuesday, June 19, 2007, in OpinionJournal.com and is reprinted with permission of the author.

John Lott [send him mail] is the author of Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t and The Bias Against Guns (Regnery 2003).

Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie, By Clayton Cramer, Nelson, 320 pages, $26.99

Did you know that in New York City, through 1969 virtually all the public high schools had riflery teams?

Thousands of students carried their rifles on subways, buses and streets on their way to school, when they went to practice in the afternoon and on their way home. And until 1963, all commercial pilots were required to carry guns and were allowed to carry guns until 1987.

Gun laws have certainly changed over time.

Today towns such as Kennesaw, Ga., Greenfeld, Idaho and Geuda Springs, Kan., which all require residents to own guns, are considered the oddity. But Clayton Cramer’s terrific new book, “Armed America,” shows that, in fact, gun ownership has been deeply woven into this country’s history since the colonial period.

Cramer shows that guns aren’t inherently the problem. In our day, criminals may have replaced Indians as a danger facing most citizens, but it may also shock many readers to learn how comfortable Americans once were with their guns.

In colonial times, as Cramer argues, people didn’t own guns just for hunting. Numerous laws mandated that people have guns for personal defense and defense of the community, at home, while traveling and even in church.

Heads of households, whether men or women, were required to have a gun at home and fines of up to a month’s wages were imposed on those who failed to meet this requirement.

In some states such as Maryland, fines were paid directly to inspectors so that authorities had a strong incentive to check. The only people exempt from these rules were Quakers, some indentured servants, or, in the South, blacks.

Fear of attack by Indians and England’s European enemies meant that people were required to own and carry guns when traveling, though sometimes older people were exempted.

At least six colonies required people have guns with them at church. Church officials were required to check parishioners when they arrived for services to ensure they had a gun. Clergymen were required to have guns, too. Contrast that with the political firestorms that erupt these days when states merely let churches decide whether concealed handgun permit holders can carry guns on church property.

In our day, only about 45 percent of households own a gun, whereas gun ownership in colonial America was much higher, as measured by probate records. Guns were bequeathed to the next generation in about 70 percent of cases.

The fascinating firsthand historical accounts that Cramer provides indicate that guns were cheap, readily available and essentially everywhere. Given America’s historical amnesia, Cramer’s book helps to remind us about that part of our history many now find improbable.

This article was originally published Sunday, March 11, 2007, in the New York Post.

John Lott [send him mail] is the author of The Bias Against Guns (Regnery 2003).

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She looked like the perfect victim. Last Friday, 56-year-old Margaret Johnson was leaving her building in her wheelchair. Except for her small dog, she was alone and didn’t see the criminal attack her from behind. Having suffered bruises to her neck and arm, a friend of Johnson’s said, "She was scared for her life. She’s devastated."

But this attack ended differently than most crimes in New York City. As her attacker grabbed her "violently" and "choked" her, Johnson pulled out a handgun and shot once, hitting the criminal in the elbow. Johnson was fortunate that she was able to defend herself.

The city obviously wasn’t there to protect Johnson. A police officer could have handled it, but cops can’t be everywhere, and they virtually always arrive after a crime has occurred.

Nor does it appear that the city was doing a particularly good job of keeping the criminal off the street to begin with. Johnson’s attacker had been previously arrested nine times, primarily for the violent crime of robbery, and he had served time in prison for selling illegal substances. One can only wonder how many times he was never caught.

Even worse, if Mayor Bloomberg would have enforced New York City’s gun-control laws, it’s Johnson who would be in jail. Her license only allows her to carry a handgun that is unloaded and in a locked container to and from a firearms range. With an attacker choking her, there is no way she could have unlocked and loaded her gun.

Ironically, just last week Bloomberg went to Washington, D.C., and lashed out at those who failed to stop people who "possess a gun illegally." What would Bloomberg recommend Johnson have done, had she sought to follow the law?

Bloomberg might want to keep in mind Johnson’s case in his lawsuits against gun dealers. The suits mention only the harm and none of the possible benefits from people owning guns to protect themselves.

Considering how others benefit from guns goes against every reflex Bloomberg has. Even after a City Council member was killed at City Hall a few years ago, Bloomberg questioned why the murdered councilman, James Davis, would want to carry a gun. Davis, a retired police officer, had a permit to carry a gun, but Bloomberg found it very troubling: "I don’t know why people carry guns," the mayor said. "Guns kill people."

Bloomberg’s crime-fighting solution was then to ban off-duty and former cops from carrying guns in City Hall. But the criminal was not an officer. Such bans have only one possible outcome: Criminals have less to worry about; in these "gun-free zones," fewer people can act to defend themselves and others.

Coincidentally, last week the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association announced its quixotic plan to push for right-to-carry concealed-handgun laws in the state. Some 40 other states already allow people to carry concealed handguns once they pass a criminal background check and meet age and some training requirements. Some 600,000 people have concealed-handgun permits just in New York’s neighboring state, Pennsylvania.

The Brady Campaign, the gun-control advocacy group, last week responded to a call for a right-to-carry law by saying: "Oh yeah, that’s going to happen — when hell freezes over."

Too bad. It would be nice if the Margaret Johnsons of New York were able to defend themselves legally.

John Lott [send him mail], a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of The Bias Against Guns (Regnery 2003).

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After five months of denial in federal district court, the city last week made an embarrassing admission: in the aftermath of the hurricane, the severely overworked police apparently had the time to confiscate thousands of guns from law-abiding citizens.

Numerous media stories have shown how useful guns were to the ordinary citizens of New Orleans who weren’t forcibly disarmed. Fox News reported several defensive gun uses. One city resident, John Carolan, was taking care of many family members, including his three-year-old granddaughter, when three men came to his house asking about his generator, threatening him with a machete. Carolan showed them his gun and they left. Another resident, Finis Shelnutt, recounts a similar story that the gangs left him alone after seeing “I have a very large gun.”

Signs painted on boarded up windows in various parts of town warned criminals in advance not to try: the owner had shotguns inside.

Last September 8, a little more than a week after the hurricane, New Orleans’ police superintendent, Eddie Compass announced: “No one will be able to be armed. Guns will be taken. Only law enforcement will be allowed to have guns.” Even legally registered firearms were seized, though exceptions were made for select businesses and for some wealthy individuals to hire guards.

Undoubtedly, selected businesses and well-connected wealthy individuals had good reason to want protection, but so did others without the same political pull. One mother saw the need for a gun after she and her two children (ages 9 and 12) saw someone killed in New Orleans after the hurricane. The mother said: “I was a card-carrying, anti-gun liberal — not anymore.”

John C. Guidos was successfully guarding his tavern on St. Claude Ave on September 7, when police took his shotgun and pistol; indeed, it was the only time that he saw any cops. Soon afterwards robbers looted the tavern. Wishing for a gun during disasters isn’t anything new. Just a little over a decade ago, police stood by, largely helpless, during the Los Angeles riots after the Rodney King verdict. Yet, not all the victims were defenseless. Korean merchants stood out as one group that banded together and used their guns to protect their stores from looting.

A similar lesson hasn’t been lost on New Orleans’ citizens. As one resident, Art DePodesta, told the New York Daily News shortly after the storm hit, “The cops are busy as it is. If more citizens took security and matters into their own hands, we won’t be in this situation.”

Not only do law-abiding citizens with guns deter many criminals from committing a crime to begin with: Possessing a gun is the safest way to confront a criminal if you are forced to.

Deterrence works. The United States has one of the world’s lowest “hot” burglary rates (burglaries committed while people are in the building) at 13 percent, compared to the “gun-free” British rate of 59 percent. Surveys of convicted burglars indicate American burglars spend at least twice as long as their British counterparts casing a house before breaking in. That explains why American burglars rarely break into homes when the residents are there. The reason most American burglars give for taking so much time is that they’re afraid of getting shot.

Even without a catastrophe like Katrina, it would have been a poor strategy for would-be victims in New Orleans merely to call 911 and wait for help. The average response time of police in New Orleans before the hurricane was eleven minutes. The Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey has shown for decades that having a gun is the safest course of action when a criminal confronts you, far safer than behaving passively.

It would be nice if the police were always there to protect us, but we don’t live in a utopia and the police understand that they almost always arrive on the scene after the crime has been committed. What does New Orleans’ Mayor Nagin recommend that people such as John Carolan and his granddaughter do the next time that have to fend for themselves? The city must know that there isn’t much of a defense for taking citizens’ guns; after all, it took them five months to admit to it.

John Lott [send him mail], a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of The Bias Against Guns (Regnery 2003).

John Lott Archives

It is hard for most Americans to imagine what Brazilians are facing. For the most recent detailed numbers, the U.S. murder rate was 5.5 per 100,000 people in 2004. For Brazil it was 28.3 in 2002. That’s just a little less than three times the record U.S. murder rate at the height of prohibition in 1933.

Brazilians have a right to be skeptical that yet more gun control is the solution. Strict licensing laws that have been in effect in Brazil since 1940 have not solved the problem. Since 1941 it has been illegal to bring a weapon outside one’s house without authorization. Eighteen gun-control laws and regulations were imposed during the period from 1992 to 2003. Many rules were extremely restrictive: For example, a 1997 law required anyone applying for a firearm license to have a psychological test and knowledge of operation of firearms, and a 1999 law limited each person to two handguns. Despite new restrictions on gun ownership being continually imposed, murder rates rose every year from 1992 to 2002, a total 41 percent increase.

Indeed, given the huge differences in murder rates between the U.S. and Brazil, it is not too surprising that gun ownership in Brazil is just a fraction of that in the U.S. Almost half of American adults live in households with guns, while just 3.5 percent of Brazilians are legally licensed to use guns.

A gun ban might not matter if police were able to protect people, but in poorer areas of Brazil’s major cities, police response times to even the most serious crimes are over an hour. Even in the wealthiest areas of cities, the fastest response times are not shorter than 15 minutes. Simply telling poor people to wait an hour for the police to show up is not very good advice.

Everyone wants to take guns away from criminals. The problem is that the law-abiding citizens, those who have followed the licensing and registration rules, are disarmed, not the criminals. This leaves potential victims more vulnerable and increases crime. As one cab driver who voted against the ban said, u201CI don’t like people walking around armed on the street. But since all the bandits have guns, you need to have a gun at home.u201D

Consider the case of Washington, D.C.. In the five years before Washington’s ban in 1976, the murder rate fell from 37 to 27 per 100,000. In the five years after the ban went into effect, the murder rate rose back up to 35. In fact, while murder rates have fluctuated after 1976, only once have they fallen below what they were that year. Robberies and overall violent-crime rates followed the same trend: Robberies fell from 1,514 to 1,003 per 100,000 leading up to 1976, and then rose by over 63 percent, up to 1,635. These drops and subsequent increases were much larger than any changes in neighboring Maryland and Virginia. For example, the District’s murder rate fell 3.5 to 3 times further than in the neighboring states and rose back 3.8 times greater.

Chicago, which has banned handguns since 1982, also saw violence rise. Chicago’s murder rate fell from 27 to 22 per 100,000 in the five years before the law, and then rose slightly to 23. The change is even more dramatic when compared to five neighboring Illinois counties. While robbery data in Chicago isn’t available for the years immediately after the ban, since 1985 (the first year for which the FBI has data) robbery rates soared.

The experience in the U.K., an island nation whose borders are much easier to monitor, should also give gun controllers pause. The British government banned handguns in 1997 but recently reported that gun crime in England and Wales nearly doubled in the four years from 1998—99 to 2002—03.

Crime was not supposed to rise after handguns were banned. Yet, since 1996 the serious-violent-crime rate has soared by 69 percent; robbery is up by 45 percent, and murders up by 54 percent. Before the law, armed robberies had fallen by 50 percent from 1993 to 1997, but as soon as handguns were banned the robbery rate shot back up, almost to 1993 levels.

Yet, hopefully Brazilians are not the only ones who have learned these lessons. San Francisco has an initiative on its November ballot to ban handgun ownership, and to ban the sale of all guns within the city. It would be a welcome sight to see both these measures struck down.

Brazilians are desperate about their crime rates, but apparently not desperate enough to wait passively for police the next time they are confronted by a criminal. Brazilians have experienced firsthand how the very gun-control regulations that they already have may in fact be the problem.

John Lott [send him mail], a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of The Bias Against Guns and More Guns, Less Crime. Fern E. Richardson is a law student at Chapman University.

John Lott Archives

"[I]t is possible that once residents gave up their handguns, San Francisco would be seen as an easy hunting ground for criminals who have no intention of giving up their own pistols."

Is it the NRA claiming that gun laws disarm law-abiding citizens and not criminals? No. Amazingly enough it was the San Francisco Chronicle, one of the more liberal newspapers in the U.S., in an editorial arguing against Proposition H, the initiative that passed on Tuesday to ban handguns in the city.

Yet, despite this reasonableness, the initiative passed with a safe margin, 58 percent of the vote. Perhaps that isn’t very surprising in a city where a proposition banning military recruiters at public high schools and colleges got even more support and almost 80 percent voted against parental notification for minors getting abortions.

Ultimately, though, the vote didn’t mean much of anything. As San Francisco’s Mayor, Gavin Newsom, a strong supporter of gun control, said, the ban "clearly will be thrown out [in court]… It’s really just a public opinion poll at the end of the day." State law prohibits local jurisdictions from enacting such a ban, and an even weaker law requiring handgun registration that was enacted by the San Francisco County Board of Supervisors in 1982 was thrown out by the California state supreme court.

The silver lining was how forcefully many organizations such as the police came out against the gun ban. Besides discussing the increases in murder occurring in Washington, D.C. after it instituted a handgun ban, the officers stated: "When we disarm honest, law-abiding citizens, we contribute to empowering criminals and endangering society-at-large." They directly acknowledged how important it was for people to be able to defend themselves with a handgun when the police couldn’t be there.

It would be nice if San Francisco could avoid the increases in violent crime rates experienced by Washington, D.C. and Chicago after their handgun bans.

But Bill O’Reilly probably said it best recently on the Fox News Channel when he noted: "Once I saw what happened in Hurricane Katrina, I said every American household should have a firearm. If there’s a tremendous earthquake in San Francisco and looting, you don’t want your family protected? You don’t want a firearm in your house? You’re living in the world of Oz."

It is one thing for a group such as the Pink Pistols, a gay-rights group that advocates people being able to defend themselves, to make these claims, but it’s a broader group talking about the importance of people being able to defend themselves and their loved ones these days. The fact that so many people discuss and debate how a gun ban can lead to more crime itself reflects how much the debate has been changing.

John Lott [send him mail], a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of The Bias Against Guns (Regnery 2003).

John Lott Archives

In Illinois on Monday, Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich started pressing to prosecute gas companies that profit from the recent price hikes brought on by the hurricane, and he is concerned that some of these increases occurred even before the hurricane hit the oil fields in the Gulf. In Hawaii on Sept. 1, the state government is supposed to begin imposing price controls on wholesale gasoline. Michigan, Oregon, California, New York and Connecticut have also debated regulating gas prices.

Even the Bush administration has gotten in on the act by having the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission look for evidence of price-gouging and believes retail and wholesale gasoline prices are “too high.” Congress is planning on holding hearings on oil company “price-gouging.”

In Texas, Attorney General Greg Abbott is threatening legal action against what he called “unconscionable pricing” by hotels that took advantage of desperate people fleeing the chaos in nearby Louisiana. In Alabama, Attorney General Troy King promises to vigorously prosecute businesses that significantly increase prices during the state of emergency.

You would think that people had learned their lessons about price controls during the 1970s, though memories have surely faded. Price controls didn’t stop the cost of gasoline from rising. They just changed how we paid for them. Instead of prices rising until the amount people wanted equaled the amount available, chronic shortages of gasoline had Americans waiting in lines for hours. Yet, the supposedly permanent shortages disappeared instantly as soon as price controls were removed.

The free advice being offered by politicians is that it was improper for prices to start rising before Hurricane Katrina disrupted production in the Gulf of Mexico. But waiting to raise prices means that consumers will end up paying even higher prices when the reduced oil flow out of the Gulf is finally felt.

Higher prices today reduce consumption and increase inventories and thus reduce how much prices will rise tomorrow. The overall increase in price will actually be less.

The possibility of higher prices when disasters strike also gives oil companies an incentive to put aside more gas to cover those emergencies. Storing gas is costly, and if you want them to bear those costs, you had better compensate them. The irony is that letting the companies charge higher prices actually reduces customers total costs when you include such things as having to wait in long lines because there will be more gas available when the disaster strikes.

The American oil industry is no more concentrated when prices started rising immediately before Hurricane Katrina hit than it was two weeks earlier, and oil companies possess no sudden increase in monopoly power. Neither have they suddenly become greedier.

Stamping out “price-gouging” by hotels merely means that more of those fleeing the storm will be homeless. No one wants people to pay more for a hotel, but we all also want people to have some place to stay. As the price of hotel rooms rises, some may decide that they will share a room with others. Instead of a family getting one room for the kids and another for the parents, some will make do with having everyone in the same room. At high enough prices, friends or neighbors who can stay with each other will do so.

There is another downside to price regulations. Companies in states all across the country, hoping to make a few dollars, are thinking of loading up their trucks with food, water and generators and heading down to Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. The higher the prices, the faster these “greedy” companies and individuals will get their products down to desperate customers. But their greed means less suffering. The more products delivered, the less prices will rise. Political grandstanding today means future disasters will turn out even worse.

What about the poor?

Making the companies pay for others’ altruism not only creates the wrong incentives, it is also unfair. If we need to help out, make everyone pay.

Bashing companies may be profitable short-term political behavior, but the discomfort will be over far sooner and less severe if markets are left to their own devices.

John Lott [send him mail], a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of The Bias Against Guns (Regnery 2003). Sonya D. Jones is a law student at Texas Tech University.

John Lott Archives

In the last couple of weeks NOW has launched several campaigns, among them:

• Some pharmacists have moral objections over selling the so-called “morning after pill.” Even though there are virtually always other nearby pharmacists and that any chain store with such a pharmacist makes arrangements for someone else to fulfill the prescription, NOW believes that even that small inconvenience places too great of a burden on a woman’s right to use her body as she sees fit, and thus such practices should be outlawed.

• NOW is also fighting for a continued ban on silicon breast implants. They claim that the claimed health risks are just to great for women to be given the choice of using these implants.

Health concerns have been raised for both the pill and implants, but health concerns aren’t really the problem here. Few products have been studied as extensively as breast implants. A Food and Drug Administration panel recently approved the use of some silicon breast implants, and silicon is used in numerous other medical devices. Comprehensive analyses from the UK Independent Review Panel on Silicone Gel Breast Implants (1998), the Institute of Medicine (1999), and the National Cancer Institute (2004) as well as journal publications such as Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (2004) have consistently found no health problems. Even when implants have ruptured, concerns about immunological or connective tissue diseases or cancers simply haven’t been born out by the research.

In addition, NOW is still fighting the last war by pointing to anecdotal stories of problems the implants used during the 1970s and 1980s even though the technology has vastly improved since then. It is hard to see why anyone would think that the newer third and fourth generation implants, which have been used outside the U.S. since 1995, pose any risk. Unlike the earlier implants where the silicon was runny and had the consistency of motor oil, the newer substances are jellylike or have an even more stable consistency. With the fourth generation, rupture simply isn’t relevant because the silicon won’t spread.

There are also other benefits. The type of woman who gets breast implants tends to have high rates of suicide, but as Joseph McLaughlin, Ph.D., of the International Epidemiology Institute in Maryland notes, that it is seems that “without the implants, the suicide rate would be even higher.” Most women who get the implants generally indicate that they are happier than they were prior to getting them.

Because of deaths from women taking the morning after pill, the FDA has ordered its highest-level warning placed on packages, but even there the risks of death are quite small (a total of five deaths in the US have been linked to the pill, though it was announced this week that more deaths are being investigated). The anecdotal deaths from this pill are much more tightly linked to the pill than is true for the anecdotal stories of problems from the implants, but NOW has never questioned making the pill as widely available to women as possible (even for young underage girls).

The costs and benefits to a woman from pregnancy seem much bigger than those from an implant, but that doesn’t explain why we trust the judgment of a thirteen year old in deciding whether to take the morning after pill but not a twenty five year old who wants implants. There appears to be a general theme connecting NOW’s positions that make it easier for women of all ages to avoid having kids and discourage them from trying to attract men.

One can even sympathize with NOW’s argument that women shouldn’t have to feel that they must go under the knife to be attractive. But women have no unique corner on this burden. News anchors get facelifts and politicians take Botox. Wall Street traders take Ritalin and everyone uses caffeinated drinks during work to stay alert and be more successful. Professional athletes sometimes undergo extensive surgeries to keep playing their sports.

If it makes television news viewers happier to watch a more youthful news anchor by more than the cost and discomfort from the surgery, what is so wrong with news anchors voluntarily getting the procedure? Would the country really be better off if we all didn’t strive so hard to be the best at what we do?

Ironically, the same organization that says that a woman’s rights to make the decisions that affect her body when it comes to abortion are sacrosanct, says those same rights are irrelevant when the woman wants to put something in her body to make herself look and feel better. Possibly if NOW members were more confident of their arguments, they wouldn’t feel it as necessary to mandate what women can and can’t do.

John Lott [send him mail], a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of The Bias Against Guns (Regnery 2003). April Dabney is an assistant at the American Enterprise Institute.

John Lott Archives

Safety is the major concern of those who ban our celebratory backyard light and noise shows: Twenty-one health- and fire-safety organizations joined together this month as the National Fire Protection Association to ban the sale of all fireworks to consumers. Their ad campaign is “Leave fireworks to the Professionals.” But their fears are overblown. Media coverage makes the issue seem much bigger than it is: A computerized search of the top 100 newspapers found more than 100 news stories in June warning that fireworks could be deadly or hazardous if used improperly. Television wasn’t much different. CNN on Tuesday headlined its segment: “A look at the dangers of fireworks.” But, despite this slanted coverage, on average just six people a year died in fireworks-related incidents from 2000 to 2003. And many of those deaths occurred at professional fireworks displays.

In contrast, about 15 times more children under the age of 10 drown in bathtubs each year than the total number of people killed in fireworks accidents. Despite the fears raised by the media, fireworks deaths are not something that people should spend much time worrying about. There is no obvious relationship over the years between fireworks use and deaths. Though almost exactly the same number of people died or were injured in 1976 and 2003, fireworks use grew almost every year, soaring from 29 million pounds of explosives used to 221 million pounds.

Ironically, the laws haven’t even produced the desired results. This may occur in part because there were few such deaths to begin with. Last year, states with bans actually had a much higher fireworks-related death rate (.027 per million people) than states without restrictions (.012 per million). Injuries are much more difficult to track, but there were an estimated 9,700 fireworks-related injuries treated in hospital emergency rooms during 2003 (6,600 in the month surrounding July 4th), the vast majority of which were relatively trivial. This is only a fraction of the over 200,000 injuries suffered from falls, accidents in bathtubs, scalding water, and electrocution.

The massive volume of the explosives sold across the United States raises a question: Short of erecting a wall around a state, how effective can any ban possibly be? In fact, banning personal use of fireworks might actually result in more accidental fires if some of those who try to avoid getting caught set them off in remote fields, causing fires that take longer to discover. Teaching the public about how to use fireworks safely is preferable to bans. Moreover, William Weimer, vice president of Phantom Fireworks, makes a pretty simple point: A lot of the accidents result when people drink too much alcohol. As he put it, “If you’ve been drinking, you should have a designated igniter, just like you should have a designated driver.”

We can protect people from only so much, and if we banned all the products that caused more deaths and injuries than fireworks, there would be virtually nothing left to use. After all, what is the Fourth of July celebrating if we criminalize even the tiny risks associated with fireworks?

John Lott [send him mail], a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of The Bias Against Guns (Regnery 2003).

John Lott Archives

For a decade, the ban was a cornerstone of the gun control movement. Sarah Brady, one of the nation’s leading gun control advocates, warned that “our streets are going to be filled with AK-47s and Uzis.” Life without the ban would mean rampant murder and bloodshed.

Well, more than nine months have passed and the first crime numbers are in. Last week, the FBI announced that the number of murders nationwide fell by 3.6% last year, the first drop since 1999. The trend was consistent; murders kept on declining after the assault weapons ban ended.

Even more interesting, the seven states that have their own assault weapons bans saw a smaller drop in murders than the 43 states without such laws, suggesting that doing away with the ban actually reduced crime. (States with bans averaged a 2.4% decline in murders; in three states with bans, the number of murders rose. States without bans saw murders fall by more than 4%.)

And the drop was not just limited to murder. Overall, violent crime also declined last year, according to the FBI, and the complete statistics carry another surprise for gun control advocates. Guns are used in murder and robbery more frequently then in rapes and aggravated assaults, but after the assault weapons ban ended, the number of murders and robberies fell more than the number of rapes and aggravated assaults.

It’s instructive to remember just how passionately the media hyped the dangers of “sunsetting” the ban. Associated Press headlines warned “Gun shops and police officers brace for end of assault weapons ban.” It was even part of the presidential campaign: “Kerry blasts lapse of assault weapons ban.” An Internet search turned up more than 560 news stories in the first two weeks of September that expressed fear about ending the ban. Yet the news that murder and other violent crime declined last year produced just one very brief paragraph in an insider political newsletter, the Hotline.

The fact that the end of the assault weapons ban didn’t create a crime wave should not have surprised anyone. After all, there is not a single published academic study showing that these bans have reduced any type of violent crime.

Research funded by the Justice Department under the Clinton administration concluded only that the effect of the assault weapons ban on gun violence “has been uncertain.” The authors of that report released their updated findings last August, looking at crime data from 1982 through 2000 (which covered the first six years of the federal law). The latest version stated: “We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence.”

Such a finding was only logical. Though the words “assault weapons” conjure up rapid-fire military machine guns, in fact the weapons outlawed by the ban function the same as any semiautomatic — and legal — hunting rifle. They fire the same bullets at the same speed and produce the same damage. They are simply regular deer rifles that look on the outside like AK-47s.

For gun control advocates, even a meaningless ban counts. These are the same folks who have never been bashful about scare tactics, predicting doom and gloom when they don’t get what they want. They hysterically claimed that blood would flow in the streets after states passed right-to-carry laws letting citizens carry concealed handguns, but that never occurred. Thirty-seven states now have right-to-carry laws — and no one is seriously talking about rescinding them or citing statistics about the laws causing crime.

Gun controllers’ fears that the end of the assault weapons ban would mean the sky would fall were simply not true. How much longer can the media take such hysteria seriously when it is so at odds with the facts?

John Lott [send him mail], a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of The Bias Against Guns (Regnery 2003).

John Lott Archives

Well, over eight months have gone by and the only casualty has been gun-controllers’ credibility. Letting the law expire only showed its uselessness.

Yet, while this lesson has been learned in the rest of the country — Illinois’ Democrat-controlled state Assembly last week defeated both a proposed assault weapons and 50-caliber gun bans — New York’s Legislature was going its own way. The Assembly last month passed new assault-weapon and 50-caliber bans by almost two-to-one margins — and some Republican state senators (such as Queens’ Frank Padavan) are signing on, too.

The irrelevance of the assault-weapons bans to crime rates was to be expected. Not a single published academic study has ever shown that these bans have reduced any type of violent crime.

Even research funded by the Justice Department in the Clinton years found only that these bans’ effect on gun violence “has been uncertain.” And when those same authors released their updated report last August, looking at crime data up through 2000 — the first six full years of the federal law — they stated, “We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence.”

And research examining New York’s own five-year-old assault-weapons ban has found it did nothing to affect crime.

Why? Simple: There’s nothing unique about the guns that these laws ban. The phrase “assault weapon” conjures up images of the rapid-fire machine guns used by the military, but the weapons in the ban actually function the same as any semiautomatic hunting rifle. They fire the exact same bullets with the exact same rapidity and produce the exact same damage.

Ignorance about these gun laws is amazingly widespread. For example, a spokesman noted that Sen. John Marchi (R-Staten Island) supported the ban because he “feels nobody needs a combat weapon to go deer-hunting.” Yet the banned guns have never been the ones used by militaries around the world. These are civilian versions of military guns — regular deer rifles that look on the outside like AK-47s etc.

Despite other myths, the firing mechanisms in semiautomatics and machine guns are completely different. The entire firing mechanism of a semiautomatic gun has to be gutted and replaced to turn it into a machine gun.

As for New York’s proposed 50-caliber ban: These guns just aren’t suited for crime. Fifty-caliber rifles are big, heavy guns, weighing at least 30 pounds and using a 29-inch barrel. They’re also relatively expensive: Models that hold one bullet at a time run nearly $3,000. Semi-automatic versions cost around $7,000.

The folks who buy them are wealthy target shooters and big-game hunters, not criminals. No one in the U.S. has ever been murdered by such a gun.

The Daily News tried adding to the hysteria with a recent front-page news story that reported, “The manufacturer of a .50-caliber sniper rifle boasts that it can bring down an airplane with a single shot, and that’s just one of the things about it that worries local lawmakers.”

But when contacted, the manufacturer said that they’d never said that. The News had relied on a false statement from a gun-control group. In fact, there is just too much redundancy in modern aircraft for a single bullet to bring down a plane.

The decision to demonize these particular guns and not, say, .475-caliber hunting rifles is completely arbitrary. The difference in width of these bullets is a trivial .025 inches. What’s next? Banning .45-caliber pistols? Instead of protecting people from terrorists or criminals, the plain goal here is to gradually reduce the type of guns that people can own.

Even for lawmakers, predictions must eventually matter. If legislators can’t see that these laws have failed to deliver as promised, it’s hard to know when facts will make a difference.

John Lott [send him mail], a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of The Bias Against Guns (Regnery 2003).

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But what has been ignored in the case of Brian Nichols is the role that affirmative action has played in hiring standards for police.

There are extremely important benefits to having police departments that mirror the characteristics of the general population. Females and minorities are important for undercover work. A female victim of crime might feel more comfortable talking to another woman. Women might be particularly useful in domestic violence cases.

The same holds true for minority victims of crime. Minority officers who come from the local communities they are policing might also bring knowledge about the area that makes them more effective officers.

The problem is that because of large differences in strength and size between men and women, different standards are applied to ensure that there are more female officers. In the Nichols case, the difference was stark: the suspect was 33 years old and 6 feet tall; the female sheriff’s deputy guarding him was 51 years old and 5-foot-2.

Similarly, the intelligence tests used to screen officers have produced different pass rates for different racial groups. To eliminate those differences, there has been a strong move to stop giving these tests over the last 30 years.

Some argue that these criteria were not important in picking officers, or that intelligence tests are culturally biased — or worse, that the screening criteria exist primarily to ensure that women and minorities are excluded from the profession. There is possibly some truth to this, but there is still the question about how far one goes to ensure that a police force mirrors the community it is protecting.

Some of these differences are fairly large. For example, in a study I published in 2000 examining the effect of affirmative action on police hiring, a comparison of male and female public safety officers found that female officers had 32 percent to 56 percent less upper-body strength and 18 percent to 45 percent less lower-body strength than male officers.

In New York City, because the physical strength rules were so weakened during the 1980s, a former NYPD personnel chief complained at one time that many police officers “lack the strength to pull the trigger on a gun” and do not have the physical strength to run after suspects.

Part of these differences between men and women can be offset by changing technology and operating procedures. Cars can replace foot and bicycle patrols. Two-officer units can replace single-officer units, though these changes mean less contact between officers and the public and less area covered.

Officers can also be issued more protective gear. Indeed, my own published research finds these exact changes in police departments when hiring standards are changed for women.

We also see that as a greater percentage of a department is made up of women, the competition among men for the remaining slots increases and the average strength and size of men admitted actually rises, partly offsetting the weaker strength of the newer female officers.

The net effect of changing hiring rules for women is mixed. I couldn’t find any significant overall change in crime rates when more female police officers were hired (though rape rates did decline). There were some less desirable consequences, and they fit in with the recent experience we have just seen in the Atlanta courthouse attack.

Increasing the number of women officers under these reduced strength and size standards consistently and significantly increases the number of assaults on police officers. In general, every 1 percent increase in the number of women in a police force results in a 15 to 19 percent increase in the number of assaults on the police, because women tend to be weaker than men.

Why? The more likely that a criminal’s assault on a police officer will be successful, the more likely criminals will do it. The major factor determining success is the relative strengths and sizes of the criminal and officer. The 200-pound Nichols might have decided not to try to escape had his guard been closer to his own size.

My research uncovered another interesting finding. Female officers are more likely to accidentally shoot people. Each 1 percent increase in the number of white female officers in a police force increases the number of shootings of civilians by 2.7 percent. Because of their weaker physical strength, female officers have less time to decide on whether to fire their weapon. If a man makes a mistake and waits too long to shoot a suspect who is attacking him, the male officer still has a chance of using his strength to subdue the attacker. Female officers (as was the case in Atlanta) will lose control of the situation at that point.

While creating a more diverse police force may produce some benefits, we still shouldn’t forget the differences between men and women. Just as women officers are better suited for some jobs, there are other jobs that simply call for large men.

John Lott [send him mail], a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of The Bias Against Guns (Regnery 2003).

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