Mr Happy on why
the thesis that allowing ordinary citizens to carry concealed handguns lowers the crime rate
may be in trouble:
No, the real killer blow to Lott’s thesis is the recent Stanford Law Review paper by Ayers
and Donohue, Shooting Down the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis (available for download as
separate text and
figures from Ayers’
homepage). The authors show that Lott’s
result is an artifact of a highly unstable statistical regression, that it fails to predict
the subsequent trends in the time series on which it was based, and that Lott’s causal
arguments are contradicted by the data. In other words, it’s shite.