http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2443681
Abstract:
For over a decade, there has been a spirited academic debate over the impact on crime of laws that grant citizens the presumptive right to carry concealed handguns in public – so-called right-to-carry (RTC) laws. In 2004, the National Research Council (NRC) offered a critical evaluation of the “More Guns, Less Crime” hypothesis using county-level crime data for the period 1977-2000. 15 of the 16 academic members of the NRC panel essentially concluded that the existing research was inadequate to conclude that RTC laws increased or decreased crime. One member of the panel thought the NRC's panel data regressions showed that RTC laws decreased murder, but the other 15 responded by saying that “the scientific evidence does not support” that position.
We evaluate the NRC evidence, and improve and expand on the report’s county data analysis by analyzing an additional six years of county data as well as state panel data for the period 1979-2010.
We also present evidence using both a more plausible version of the Lott and Mustard specification, as well as our own preferred specification (which, unlike the Lott and Mustard model presented in the NRC report, does control for rates of incarceration and police). While we have considerable sympathy with the NRC’s majority view about the difficulty of drawing conclusions from simple panel data models and re-affirm its finding that the conclusion of the dissenting panel member that RTC laws reduce murder has no statistical support, we disagree with the NRC report’s judgment on one methodological point: the NRC report states that cluster adjustments to correct for serial correlation are not needed in these panel data regressions, but our randomization tests show that without such adjustments the Type 1 error soars to 22-73 percent.
(emphasis mine, see later)
There's a download link towards the bottom right.
It attempts to show RTC does NOT reduce crime etc.
Now, regarding the emphasis. I'll admit, I have not read the paper yet. It's ~100 pages. My complaint immediately is that it looks like the paper is attempting to tweak models. So called "science" papers frequently discuss altering models or altering data and blah blah blah. I
hate folks that try to tweak models or massage data to fit a particular purpose In doing so, they are
biasing whatever the topic/data/etc is about towards a goal they want.
Stellar formation, quantum mechanics, gun control, social policy, global warming.
Tweaking **** to achieve a result you want ain't research. It's propaganda.
Am I going to read it ? Probably. When I hit the modeling portion of beginnings of the paper, I'll prolly get too enraged to finish it
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