While I don’t agree with the premise that possession stats should be publicized, the fact that ‘more guns’ means ‘more safety’ is undeniable.
Late in 2008, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, a leading Tennessee newspaper, unleashed a whirlwind of controversy when it decided to publish a database of all state residents with permits to carry handguns. The information was already available through the Tennessee Department of Safety, but the state website wasn’t especially user-friendly.
With the publication of the newspaper database, however, it became easy to search for people with gun-carry permits by name, ZIP code, or city. For a while, the database was the most viewed item on the newspaper’s website, with more than 65,000 page views per day.
Firearms owners and their advocates were furious, as WMC-TV reported at the time:
Some Mid-South gun owners are outraged over a website that lists handgun carry permits, claiming the site gives away too much personal information.
Tom Givens, who runs the Range Master pistol range, said the database, published by the Commercial Appeal, has many of his clients upset.
“First, it’s an invasion of privacy,” Givens said.
Using the database, a visitor to the website can look up the name of anyone who has a permit to carry a hand gun in the state of Tennessee. Information listed includes the owner’s year of birth, along with his or her city, state, and ZIP code of residence.
Givens said his phone has been ringing off the hook from clients upset about their personal information being so accessible.
“By publishing this database your employers, your co-workers, church members, even relatives that may not know you have a permit, now know that you’ve got one,” he said.
On gun owners’ message boards, complaints abounded. A common concern was that residents with carry permits would be put at particular risk, since the paper’s database enabled any would-be thief looking for a gun to steal to know exactly where to find them. “I’m not happy about it at all,” fumed one resident on the City-Data web forum:
I’m not a criminal — just a law-biding citizen who has a clean background and has undergone background checks in order to exercise my right to protect myself from all the thugs in this world. I could see the database used to “shop” for homeowners to rob who probably have guns in the house. I see no legitimate reason to have this information online other than to demonize permit holders in some way.
The National Rifle Association’s CEO and executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, denounced the Commercial Appeal for engaging in what he called a “hateful, shameful form of public irresponsibility.” Added another NRA official: “What they’ve done is give criminals a lighted pathway to [burglarize] the homes of gun owners.”
But the paper’s editor, Chris Peck, argued that newspapers should be a comprehensive source for community information, and that it was neither illegal nor unethical for the Commercial Appeal to make public records more accessible to the public. In fact, he pointed out in a lengthy column, the Commercial Appeal eliminated street addresses and birth dates from the Department of Safety data it published. That meant that the “posted list of permit holders for concealed weapons has less information about individuals than the phone book, your voter registration form, or the credit card you use to buy dinner at a restaurant.”
As for the potential danger to gun owners from burglars looking for weapons to steal, Peck turned that argument on its head:
Think about it for a minute. Many, if not most, households in Memphis possess a firearm. So you don’t really need a list to find a house with a gun.
And, if criminals were checking the permit-to-carry list before picking a target, would they likely choose a house where they know the owner could be carrying a gun, or would they more likely steer away from that house to avoid a possible confrontation?
Neither logic nor common sense is carrying the day on this issue. It’s emotion.
Peck went on to explain why, in his view, there was “a powerful case to be made both for a permitting process to carry concealed weapons and for keeping that permitting process public.” The Commercial Appeal, he insisted, “isn’t anti-gun” but “pro-news and -information.”
I thought it was a good column, though I doubt it changed the minds of LaPierre and the gun owners who were certain the Commercial Appeal’s reasons for publishing the database weren’t benign. I’d guess, too, that they didn’t buy Peck’s contention that, far from endangering them, the database would lead criminals to avoid their homes.
But now we know: He was right.
After Memphis-area gun permit data was published, districts where more residents were licensed to carry saw a decrease in crime.
That is the conclusion of a National Bureau of Economic Research study just published by Alessandro Acquisti, a professor of information technology and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, and Catherine Tucker , a professor of management science and marketing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their paper, “Guns, Privacy, and Crime,” attempted to answer Peck’s rhetorical question, “using detailed crime and handgun carry permit data for Memphis and nearby areas, from before and after the newspaper’s publication of the permits.”
Their findings were pretty conclusive: “We find that burglaries increased in ZIP codes with fewer gun permits, and decreased in those with more gun permits, after the database was publicized.” Specifically, in ZIP codes with the largest number of residents who had permits to carry firearms, the number of burglaries fell by 18 percent. That decrease took place even as burglaries were going up throughout the entire region covered by the database.
In other words, Acquisti and Tucker wrote, “burglars may have been deterred from burglarizing houses in higher-gun-permit ZIP codes, their crimes being displaced to ZIP codes with fewer guns.” They added:
The same is true of premeditated homicide, which may explain why so many mass shootings have taken place in gun-free zones, such as public schools, college campuses — even, paradoxically, military bases. In the wake of terrible massacres in synagogues and churches, a number of houses of worship now post notices specifying that they are not gun-free zones.
Much of the debate in this country over gun ownership and gun control pits two camps against each other: those who are convinced that more guns must lead to more crime vs. those who see lawful gun ownership as an effective bulwark against crime. To my mind, the data strongly support the more-guns-less-crime analysis. When Massachusetts in 1998 enacted what was widely described as the toughest gun-control legislation in the country, advocates confidently predicted that the Commonwealth would enjoy a significant drop in gun-related crime. That wasn’t how things turned out.
The converse happened after the US Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, which struck down a longstanding gun ban in the nation’s capital as unconstitutional. The city’s mayor predicted in dismay that “more handguns in the District of Columbia will only lead to more handgun violence,’’ yet crime in the district plunged. Murder nose-dived to its lowest rate in half a century, falling from 186 in 2008 to 144 in 2009 to 132 in 2010 to 108 in 2011.
The new study adds weight to the presumption that more guns in the hands of law-abiding owners (i.e., those who properly register their firearms when required to do so) makes those gun-owners safer. There is a measure of irony, too: Second Amendment activists were so certain that publication of the gun-permit data would expose them to danger. In reality, it did the opposite.
According to Acquisti and Tucker, only 19 states open gun-permit holders’ information to the public. More states should be doing so — with the approval, not the resistance, of those who champion the right to keep and bear arms.