Washington Post More Guns Equal More Crime Blog Post Misses Important Facts

Last weekend, Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post's Wonkblog had this post reporting on a September piece by Stanford law professor John Donohue and his colleagues that purports to discredit Dr. John Lott's work More Guns Less Crime. That in and of itself is not new. A number of anti-rights academics have sought to show Lott's work is flawed since it was first published.  According to Wonk Blog, Donohue has added another decade of data to support their thesis:

Now, Stanford law professor John Donohue and his colleagues have added another full decade to the analysis, extending it through 2010, and have concluded that the opposite of Lott and Mustard's original conclusion is true: more guns equal more crime.

"The totality of the evidence based on educated judgments about the best statistical models suggests that right-to-carry laws are associated with substantially higher rates" of aggravated assault, robbery, rape and murder, Donohue said in an interview with the Stanford Report. The evidence suggests that right-to-carry laws are associated with an 8 percent increase in the incidence of aggravated assault, according to Donohue. He says this number is likely a floor, and that some statistical methods show an increase of 33 percent in aggravated assaults involving a firearm after the passage of right-to-carry laws.

On Sunday, Lott's Crime Prevention Research Center had a post pointing out where Ingraham is wrong. The post notes that Lott had already used the additional data in his most recent updated edition of More Guns Less Crime:

There are many errors in Ingraham’s article.  For example, “Stanford law professor John Donohue and his colleagues have added another full decade to the analysis.”  Yet, the third edition of “More Guns, Less Crime” has data from 1977 to 2005.  Moody, Marvell, Zimmerman, and Alemante have a new paper earlier this year that looked at data from 1977 to 2006.  Gius (2014) looked at data up through 2009.  Zimmerman (2014) looks at crime data up through 2010.   Previously even in the Washington Post, Emily Badger’s misleading column also discussed an earlier version of Donohue’s paper with data through 2006 (7/29).

And, CPRC even used a graph from the 3rd Edition of More Guns Less Crime that uses the very data that Donohue says should be used, the way they say it should be used.

So you tell me, do more guns equal more crime?

Is "Tough on Crime" Dead?

That's the question that the Washington Post Wonkblog asks.  The writer, Emily Badger, leads in with the discussion of the questions some of the public and politicians have raised related to whether we have militarized our civilian law enforcement and uses it to transition into a discussion of what most of us have associated with the term "Tough on Crime:"

For decades, that idea has dominated sentencing policy, political ads, local police tactics and federal law-enforcement support. "Tough on crime" became intertwined with the "war on drugs." It yielded "three strikes" laws and mandatory minimum sentencing. It drove the unmatched rise of American incarceration. It justified the deployment of harsh police tactics and the need for meaner equipment, both of which have been used beyond drug crime. It became a potent political label, the only acceptable adjective: If you're not tough on crime, then you don't have anything worth saying about crime at all.

In Virginia, George Allen rode into the Governor's Office in 1993 talking about "liberal lenient parole."  By the time he left office, parole had basically been abolished.  He built new prisons but Virginia actually rented out prison space to other states for a time.  Virginia led the nation in some of these policies, but not all states followed our example.  No parole, three strikes laws, and keeping violent criminals off of the streets is what I associate with "tough on crime,"  not "harsh police tactics," armored vehicles and military grade weapons.  So, you understand my confusion at the connections Badger makes in her piece.  She asserts that the phrase is now in retreat:

Today, "tough on crime" appears to be decidedly in retreat, as conservatives have begun to balk at the financial costs of incarceration, and as liberals have objected to the costs in civil liberties — and the disproportionate racial impacts — of aggressive policing. The rhetoric of "tough on crime" is fading.

Hopefully, Badger is wrong and policy makers will separate the question of the type of equipment civilian law enforcement uses from the question of keeping violent criminals in jail.  We certainly don't want more of the type of stories that Cam Edwards of NRANews shares daily on his program.