Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't (21 page)

Overall, the three crime fighting techniques outlined above—increased use of the death penalty, rising arrest and conviction rates, and the passage of right-to-carry laws—account for between 50 and 60 percent of the drop in murder rates during the 1990s. While all these methods are the subject of much controversy, their effectiveness in reducing crime has been proven time and again.
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As we saw in our discussion of abortion, different age groups commit crimes at different rates. Violent criminals are overwhelmingly male youths between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five. An offender’s likelihood of committing murder rises until he is twenty years old, then falls after that. By the time a person is twenty-nine, his likelihood of committing murder has declined to about half of what it was at age twenty.
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Although the relative rates that different age groups commit crime vary somewhat over time, in any year the odds of a person in his twenties committing murder are much higher than for those in their thirties. Presumably, if we could magically transform all the twenty-year-olds into thirty-five or forty-year-olds, there would be a huge decline in murder rates. Older people just don’t commit as many violent crimes as the young.

Despite the sensitivity of the subject, it must be mentioned that race is also a very important factor in crime statistics.
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African Americans are the most likely perpetrators of crime as well as the most common victims. In 2002, while the national murder rate was 5.6 per 100,000 people, the rate that African American males between seventeen and twenty-five committed murder was seventy-eight per 100,000, or about fourteen times the national rate. For white males of the same age group, the rate was fourteen per 100,000. It should also be noted that young African American males commit murder at a much higher rate than African Americans in general—in 2002, the overall African American murder rate was 24.1 per 100,000. This was well below its peak rate of 51.4 in 1991, although it is still much higher than the current rate of 3.6 for whites and 2.7 for all other ethnic groups. Murderers also overwhelmingly kill people of their own race. Ninety-one percent of African Americans are murdered by other African Americans, and 84 percent of whites are murdered by other whites.
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Although age and race are very important generally, these factors didn’t play much of a role in pushing crime rates lower in the 1990s. The share of the population between sixteen and thirty slowly declined over most of the last thirty years. This slightly reduced crime, but is offset by the rise in the share of the African American population from 11.7 percent in 1976 to 13 percent in 2004. These and other demographic changes, however, are too minor and too slow to explain most of the year-to-year variations in crime rates. The impact of the changing age and demographic composition of America is simply swamped by the drastic fall in crime rates both among the young and among the African American population at large.

Gun control advocates seemed certain. They predicted that when the federal assault-weapons ban expired on September 13, 2004—ten years after taking effect—gun crimes would surge out of control. Sarah Brady, a leading gun control advocate, warned that the ban’s termination would
effectively “arm our kids with Uzis and AK-47s” and “fill” our streets with the weapons.
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Senator Charles Schumer ratcheted up the rhetoric, labeling the banned guns “the weapons of choice for terrorists.”
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Firearm-related murders and robberies were expected to sky-rocket. Only states with their own assault-weapon bans would escape the coming bloodshed, we were warned.

And what really happened? According to FBI statistics, during 2004 the murder rate nationwide fell by 3 percent, the first drop since 2000, with firearm deaths dropping by an impressive 4.4 percent. Even more remarkably, the monthly murder rate
fell
after the assault weapons ban expired. And not only did it fall, but it plummeted 14 percent from August through December.
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The murder rate in the seven states with their own assault-weapons bans declined by a smaller amount than in the forty-three states without such laws—an average 2 percent drop in states with bans compared to 3.4 percent in states without them. While it remains unclear how much of the drop in crime can be attributed to the expiration of the assault-weapons ban, it is readily apparent that the ban did nothing to reduce crime.

A study funded by the Justice Department during the Clinton Administration found that the effect of the assault weapons ban on gun violence “has been uncertain.” The report’s authors released updated findings in August 2004, analyzing crime data from 1982 through 2000 (which covered the first six years of the federal assault weapons ban). Their conclusion: “We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence.”
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The findings were unsurprising because there is nothing unique about the guns that had been banned. These weapons function the same as any semiautomatic hunting rifle does; they fire the same bullets with the same rapidity and produce the same damage. Although the phrase “assault weapon” conjures up images of military-style rapid-fire machine guns, machine guns were not covered by the ban—they were already illegal
when the ban took effect, and remained so after the ban expired. The firing mechanisms in semiautomatic and machine guns are completely different. The entire firing mechanism of a semiautomatic gun has to be gutted and replaced in order to turn it into a machine gun.

The second most important piece of gun control legislation has been the 1994 Brady Act, which required criminal background checks for gun purchases and, until 1998, a five-day waiting period. But since its enactment, economists and criminologists have been unable to identify any impact on crime rates. The general problem with gun bans is that it’s the law-abiding gun owners who obey them. Criminals find ways to get illegal guns, just like they find ways to get illegal drugs. If we want to further decrease gun crimes, banning citizens from owning guns has clearly shown itself to be an inefficient method.