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.