“Robbery is a good place to start our inquiry because it is committed in public more than other crime, and should be the crime most likely to decline if the Lott and Mustard story of deterrence has any plausibility.” (p. 11) “the failure of the model to show a drop in robbery, casts doubt on the causal story that they advance.” (p. 22) Ayres and Donohue have consistently argued over several papers that robbery is the key result upon which the deterrence by right-to-carry laws is based.9 In contrast, Lott has argued many times that there is no a priori reason to believe that the benefits are larger for robbery than other violent crimes.10 But putting that debate aside, the robbery results presented by Ayres and Donohue present a very clear, consistent story (Figure 1a). The state level analysis shows that robbery rates continued rising, though at a slower rate, for the first two years after the law was passed. However, after that, robbery rates in right-to-carry states fell relative to non-right-to-carry states for the next 9 years, and then remained fairly constant through year 17. The two sets of county level estimates are even more dramatic. Robbery rates in right-to-carry states were rising until the laws were passed and then fell continually after that point. The pattern is very similar to that shown earlier by Lott in examining county level data from 1977 to 1996.
Their county and state estimates paint a very consistent picture, but they dismiss the fact that state data estimated a 4.5 percent the drop in murder rates during the first three years of the law as showing “relatively little movement.”12 Their state level regressions indicate that murder rates were rising in the three years prior to the law being passed and then falling over the next thirteen years. Only one state, Maine, had had the law in effect for more than 13 years. The increase during years 14, 15, 16, and 17 thus solely reflect changes in Maine’s murder rate and since this is state level data each coefficient represents only one data point. The values for these four years show up in the data only because Ayres and Donohue recode Maine’s right-to-carry law as going into effect in 1981 instead of 1985 as previous research had done.13 The increase between years 13 and 14 is also more apparent than real. The real “increase” is actually not due to any sudden change in Maine’s crime rates, but due to the fact that other states are included in calculating the crime rate for year 13, while only Maine is used for year 14.
By the time the law has been in effect for six years, Ayres and Donohue’s very own county and state estimates imply that murder rates had fallen by at least 10 percent.
Ayres and Donohue’s county and state level results for rapes and aggravated assaults are more ambiguous. The county level estimates without the individual state trends show that both rape and aggravated assaults fell almost continually after the laws were enacted (Figures 1c and 1d). Even choosing for comparison the sixth year after the law where rape and aggravated assault rates have slightly risen back up, still leaves rapes 9 percent below their peak and aggravated assaults 3 percent below theirs.
In short the Ayers and Donahue study that is touted by the gun grabboids is political research to justify gun grabbing and seriously flawed. In other words the gun grabbers are lying some more
They can't tell the truth, 'cause then they would be out of a job.