In our initial article—Shooting Down the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis—we reached two main conclusions: First, that there was no credible statistical evidence that the adoption of concealed-carry (or “shall-issue”) laws reduced crime; and second, that...
Moody and Marvell’s recent article in this journal examines a regression-based calculation in Ayres and Donohue (2003a) that indicated, based on state-specific estimates that were generated using county data from 1977-1997, that right-to-carry concealed handguns (RTC)...
Moody and Marvell (MM) have now replied to our comment (Ayres and Donohue 2009) on their initial 2008 publication, “The Debate on Shall-Issue Laws.” MM begin their latest effort—“The Debate on Shall-Issue Laws, Continued”—by declaring that they “are not advocates” of...
In a remarkable paper published in 1997, John Lott and David Mustard managed to set the agenda for much subsequent dataset work on the impact of guns on crime in America by creating a massive dataset of crime across all U.S. counties from 1977 through 1992 and by...
For over a decade, there has been a spirited academic debate over the impact on crime of laws that grant citizens the presumptive right to carry concealed handguns in public—so-called right-to-carry (RTC) laws. In 2005, the National Research Council (NRC) offered a...
