Guns for protection, and other private sector responses to the Government's failure to control crime (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2013
I focus on the effect of changes in public security (policing) on private security measures that potential victims can take. In particular, I look at the tradeoff between different types of private security measures-such as using or carrying guns, carrying less cash or keeping less valuables at home, and using burglar alarms or Lojack-and study how this tradeoff is affected by changes in public security. If private householders' direct security expenses are strongly substitutable with public policing (e.g., for guns which may be more useful in badly policed areas), an increase in policing results in a drop in these expenses; it also results in carrying or keeping less cash (an indirect security measure which reduces the prize a criminal can seize). If, however, householders' direct security expenses are "complementary" to policing in the sense that they are more effective when police response is rapid (e.g., for burglar alarms), more policing increases these expenses unless the efficacy of joint (public and private) security expenses on combating crime encounters very sharply diminishing returns; moreover, a rise in policing also induces carrying or keeping more cash. An increase in penalties increases the tendency to keep cash on hand, and also reduces crime, provided that as private precautions increase, with policing constant, it takes a larger increment in security spending to compensate for a specific drop in penalties. The results are consistent with some empirical trends in crime rates, policing, penalties and private precautions.
Bang!' Goes the Neighbourhood: Firearms, Violence and Social Disorder
A distinctive feature of the modern form of governing has been the effective monopolisation of legitimate force in the hands of the state. There is, no doubt, something of a tautology here for, as Walter Benjamin observed, echoing Shakespeare, 'legitimacy' is one of the spoils that usually accrue to the victor. There is, of course, usually far more to it in practice. Consolidation of the means of violence and the establishment of collective security must rank as the first foundations of liberal governance. One need not accept the central premises of contract theory; it is enough to acknowledge its powerful ideological legacy. Thus, for Hobbes, singular authority ended the war of all against all. For Locke this legitimate authority established the order of life, liberty and property and, later, for Blackstone, it sought to enshrine the doctrine of personal security without which all other rights were meaningless. With Blackstone, however, the principle of the right of individuals to collective security was placed in tension with another, the right of individuals to protect themselves if threatened. The different evolution of this Common Law principle in English and American conditions is worth noting. In the latter context, the conditions of frontier society, and a mixture of individualism, egalitarianism and republican resistance sponsored a much stronger 'right to self defence' than was tolerated under English Law (Brown 1991).[1] In the discursive 'space' between these contrasting resolutions of the authority and order problem, two distinct approaches to the issue of collective security emerged which, in their own ways, have become more problematic in recent years (see McDowell and Loftin 1983). The first approach concerns the idea of security and justice as public goods which cannot be rationally and efficiently allocated by private market mechanisms. To some extent this presumption has already been challenged, in theory and practice, on both sides of the Atlantic and in post-apartheid South Africa (Cohen 1990). In the USA, South Africa, and in large thirdworld cities such as Rio de Janeiro, perimeter security cordons, armed private police forces and state of the art access control systems guard downtown business districts, tourist-rich locations, and up-market residential enclaves. In Britain, where the commitment to collective security has been more enduring, although private sector policing has been one of the fastest growth industries (South 1988), the idea of privatised personal or residential security, whilst widespread in the business and retail sectors, has not yet made such dramatic inroads into more conventional policing tasks. More recently, we have witnessed an emerging neo-liberal (or republican) critique of collective security as a concept. In the US, this critique has been tightly tied into the debate over Second Amendment rights to own and carry firearms. More recently the debate has broadened out to cover the post-Vietnam, anti-federal, 'survivalist' groups and the variety of paramilitary organisations which, since Waco and Oklahoma, and the Clinton Administration's gun-control measures, have been an especial focus of concern. The advocates of this 'new republicanism' drew upon the neo-liberal, even libertarian, arguments that 'social justice' is a mirage (Hayek 1976), 'society' no more than an aggregate of individuals (Nozick 1974) and 'collectivism' a dangerous, passive and stultifying form of unfreedom (Joseph and Sumption 1979, Letwin 1983). The alternative suggested by Nozick involved the idea of private protection agencies, supported by public subscription, and flourishing or failing according to market principles (Nozick 1974: 12-15). The irony for Nozick was precisely, in his view, the tendency of private protection agencies to amalgamate and ultimately to monopolise the exercise of coercive force, thereby establishing a new basis for the minimalist state. The fact that this supposed tendency towards monopolisation is detected by Nozick, yet nowhere in his work specifically rejected as undesirable, takes us to the second approach to the problem of collective security, namely the question of its legitimacy. In place of the single social contract of authority, Nozick substitutes a multitude of individual contracts of choice. Clearly, forms of legitimation are crucial to each approach. The legitimacy of state collectivist forms of security rested upon periodic democratic legitimation and 'consent'; the implied endorsement given to legal codes and the systems of rights and obligations they established for citizens. Only a single sovereign authority could guarantee such 'rights', or indeed take them away.
Tough Targets: When Criminals Face Armed Resistance from Citizens
The ostensible purpose of gun control legislation is to reduce firearm deaths and injuries. The restriction of access to firearms will make criminals unable to use guns to shoot people. Gun control laws will also reduce the number of accidental shootings. Those are the desired effects, at least in theory. It is important, however, for conscientious policymakers to consider not only the stated goals of gun control regulations, but the actual results that they produce.What would be the effect of depriving ordinary, law-abiding citizens from keeping arms for self-defense? One result seems certain: the law-abiding would be at a distinct disadvantage should criminals acquire guns from underground markets. After all, it is simply not possible for police officers to get to every scene where they are urgently needed.Outside of criminology circles, relatively few people can reasonably estimate how often people use guns to fend off criminal attacks. If policymakers are truly interested in har...
More Guns, Less Crime Fails Again: The Latest Evidence from 1977 â•fi 2006
2009
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 laws granting citizens the right to carry concealed handguns (rtc laws). In support of this claim, MM note that they have published papers finding that RTC laws both reduce crime (two papers) and do not reduce crime (three papers). Given the fact that neither MM (2008) nor their latest comment tries to reconcile the internal conflict in their own writings, let alone the larger literature, it is puzzling that a tweak on our 2003 paper would lead them to conclude their 2008 paper by stating, “In our judgment, the weight of the evidence ... indicates that shall issue laws reduce crime.” to the extent that they have now backed away from that claim, progress will have been made. Nonetheless, MM claimed to find support for th...
Significance, 2014
ABSTRACT America seems obsessed as no other nation by guns. Mass shootings such as at Columbine and at Sandy Hook school in Connecticut bring calls for gun control laws. Opponents claim that such laws would only disarm the law-abiding and that the right to bear arms deters crime. It might perhaps seem obvious that a ban on the most lethal weapons would reduce murder rates, and that allowing concealed weapons to be carried would increase them. Mark Gius examines those conclusions to see whether the statistics back them up.