guns & burglaries

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Thu May 9 13:35:18 PDT 2002


"The Effects of Gun Prevalence on Burglary: Deterrence vs

Inducement"

BY: PHILIP J. COOK

Duke University

Sanford Institute of Public Policy

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

JENS LUDWIG

The Brookings Institution

Economic Studies Program

Document: Available from the SSRN Electronic Paper Collection:

http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=310473

Paper ID: NBER Working Paper No. W8926

Date: May 2002

Contact: PHILIP J. COOK

Email: Mailto:cook at pps.duke.edu

Postal: Duke University

Sanford Institute of Public Policy

Durham, NC 27708 UNITED STATES

Phone: 919-613-7360

Fax: 919-681-8288

Co-Auth: JENS LUDWIG

Email: Mailto:jludwig at brookings.edu

Postal: The Brookings Institution

Economic Studies Program

1775 Massachusetts Avenue, NW

Washington, DC 20036 UNITED STATES

ABSTRACT:

The proposition that widespread gun ownership serves as a

deterrent to residential burglary is widely touted by advocates,

but the evidence is weak, consisting of anecdotes, interviews

with burglars, casual comparisons with other countries, and the

like. A more systematic exploration requires data on local rates

of gun ownership and of residential burglary, and such data have

only recently become available. In this paper we exploit a new

well-validated proxy for local gun-ownership prevalence - the

proportion of suicides that involve firearms - together with

newly available geo-coded data from the National Crime

Victimization Survey, to produce the first systematic estimates

of the net effects of gun prevalence on residential burglary

patterns. The importance of such empirical work stems in part

from the fact that theoretical considerations do not provide

much guidance in predicting the net effects of widespread gun

ownership. Guns in the home may pose a threat to burglars, but

also serve as an inducement, since guns are particularly

valuable loot. Other things equal, a gun-rich community provides

more lucrative burglary opportunities than one where guns are

more sparse. The new empirical results reported here provide no

support for a net deterrent effect from widespread gun

ownership. Rather, our analysis concludes that residential

burglary rates tend to increase with community gun prevalence.



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