Does Gun Control Work?

There have been a lot of claims thrown around after the murders at the Umpqua Community College in Oregon.  President Obama and the anti-rights groups have been quick to call for more firearms prohibitions, more gun control laws.  I wondered if “gun control” works.  I looked at the data, and I’d say “gun control” fails.  Let me show you.

I put the term “gun control” in quotes for a reason.  There are some 23 thousand gun control laws.  I doubt that each and every gun control law is equally effective at reducing crime.  I don’t know how to weight the importance of each law.  I also don’t know how to compare similar laws between states.  For example, is hunter education a part of “gun control”, and is it as effective as “mandatory waiting periods” in reducing violent crime?  I appealed to the experts to answer that question.

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence issues a scorecard each year.  They rate the gun prohibitions in each state.  I used their system to put the states in order from those with strict gun laws to those with lax gun laws.  The data I used is from their state scorecards for the end of 2013.

I also wanted to know the rate of violent crime in each state.  The FBI crime data from 2012  provided that data. 

What should we expect to see?  If gun control really made a difference, then we could predict the crime rate based on the gun control laws.  We would see a decrease in criminal violence in states where criminals gave up their guns due to strict gun control laws.  At the opposite end of the scale, we would see an increase in crime in the states where gun control laws were lax.    If gun control really worked, then the graph should look something like this.

What would the data look like if gun control was ineffective?  If criminals didn’t care about gun laws and the states were otherwise very similar, then we would see very similar rates of violence in each state.  That says gun control is not a real factor that determines the crime rate.  Knowing how a state ranks in gun laws would tell us very little about the states crime rate.  A statistician would say crime is not correlated with gun control.

Now let’s look at the real data.  I put the states in order of their Brady rank and then plotted the rate of violent crime.  We don’t see results like my two examples.  Instead, the rate of violent crime varies by a factor of about 6-to-1 between the different states.  That means there are factors that significantly influence the rate of crime.    In contrast to their claims, the Brady Campaign’s rank of gun control laws in each state has almost nothing to do with the rate of violent crime.  The least violent and most violent states have nearly the same Brady score.  Look for yourself.  You can’t predict a states crime rate if  you know their gun control laws.

Maybe the effects of gun control are hidden.  Maybe gun control works to control some violent crimes, but not others.  I also looked at the rates of aggravated assault and forcible rape to see if they were effected by state gun laws.  Again, I put the states in order and plotted their crime rates.

The strictness of a state’s gun laws does not predict the rate of forcible rape or aggravated assault.  Neither of those violent crimes shows a strong correlation with their ranking by the Brady Campaign.

What do these results tell us?  The data tells us that the gun control laws as weighed by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence do not control crime.  Other laws and public practices might control crime.  We see large differences from state to state.  Whatever controls crime, it is not those gun laws.  That does not mean that crime can’t be reduced.

We have seen laws and social trends change with time.  Gun ownership has increased by over 60% since the mid 1990s.  We would expect crime to rise if guns caused crime.  In fact we see the opposite effect.   According to FBI data, the rate of violent crime has fallen almost 50 percent over the same time period.

I’ve had anti-gun spokesmen tell me that gun control stopped crime and saved lives.  Now that I’ve seen the data, I’d say gun control has very little effect on criminal violence.  I’d say the anti-gun spokesman lied to me.

So did President Obama.
~_~_

Rob

Later confirmation by Professor Eugene Volokh here.