This paper uses a "local average treatment effect" (LATE) framework in an attempt to disentangle the separate effects of criminal and noncriminal gun prevalence on violence rates. We first show that a number of previous studies have failed to properly address the problems of endogeneity, proxy...

The recent increase in the national homicide rate in the United States has generated much speculation about its causes among the media. In this article we show how two data visualization tools, funnel charts and time series fan charts, can show the typical volatility in homicide rates in...

John Donohue and colleagues recently assessed the impact of "right-to-carry" (RTC) laws on crime rates. These laws make it easier to get a carry permit. Donohue et al. claim that their analysis indicates that, contrary to what nearly all other researchers have found, these laws increase violent...

John Donohue and his colleagues assessed the impact of "right-to-carry" (RTC) laws on crime rates. These laws make it easier to get a carry permit. Donohue et al. claim that their analysis indicates that, contrary to what nearly all other researchers have found, these laws increase violent...

Purposes To determine if perceived risk of criminal victimization, and past criminal victimization experiences, increases the likelihood of a person owning a gun for self-protection, and to determine if defects in past research concerning the way gun ownership was measured had obscured such...

This paper uses a “local average treatment effect” (LATE) framework in an attempt to disentangle the separate effects of criminal and noncriminal gun prevalence on violence rates. We first show that a number of previous studies have failed to properly address the problems of endogeneity,...

The positive correlation between gun prevalence and homicide rates has been widely documented. But does this correlation reflect a causal relationship? This study seeks to answer the question of whether more guns cause more crime, and unlike nearly all previous such studies, we properly account...