More gun laws, more murder? Quinnipiac prof’s study suggests it
But the study’s author says more research is needed on the issue before lawmakers run with its conclusions.
Mark Gius, an economics professor at Quinnipiac for two decades, admitted he was a little bit flabbergasted Monday at the response his study has been getting since it was published in the November issue of the academic journal, “Applied Economics Letters.” He had just returned Monday afternoon from Hartford, where he appeared in a segment on Fox News Channel about the study.
“I’ve actually done other research on gun control and gun ownership,” Gius said. “So it’s kind of amazing that, for some reason, this article really took off.”
Gius, a 51-year-old Democrat, said economics professors often do research on policy issues and laws on crime and guns “to see if they have the desired impact.” His topic was his own idea, not funded by any company, he said. But he said he’s half-regretting it, given the number of media people who want to talk about it.
Gius was on Al Jazeera America Sunday night and is getting interview requests from the Washington Times and other papers.
He can’t put his finger on why this one attracted the media when others did not, but he has some clues.
About a month ago, Gius was contacted by John Lott Jr., who wrote a study on the topic in 1997 with David Mustard that produced similar findings. He sent Lott a requested copy of the paper. (Lott’s study and subsequent work about “More guns, less crime,” have been sharply debated by gun-control advocates.)
For Gius, Lott’s interest may have helped shine a spotlight on his modest paper that taps into a hot-button topic in post-Newtown America.
Gius’ paper studied a broader swath of time, 1980-2009, than previous ones and focused on the gun-related murder rate instead of the more-general homicide rate. The results suggest to some that restrictive concealed weapons laws may cause an increase in gun-related murders at the state level. But nothing is simple in the gun debate, as Gius pointed out with another finding of the study.
“During the period of the federal assault weapons ban (which was repealed in 2004), murder rates were approximately 20 percent higher than in the nonfederal weapons period,” he said. “But even there, you have to think about the time the assault weapons ban was in effect. It was right at the tail end of the crack epidemic... early to ’mid-90s. From 1994 to 2004 and since then, there’s been a pretty dramatic decline in the crime rate, even the violent crime rate.”
The federal assault weapons ban also wasn’t effective because it grandfathered in all existing assault weapons, he said, and it banned only certain features of the weapons.
Ron Pinciaro, executive director of Connecticut Against Gun Violence, said the problem with the assault-weapons comparison is that it shouldn’t be linked to the overall murder rate.
“Most gun homicides are committed in urban centers and they’re not committed with assault weapons,” he said. “If you were to compare, say, mass shootings in a state before and after an assault weapons ban, you’d get a very different result.”
Pinciaro said on concealed-weapons laws, it’s also not fair to compare states with large urban populations with states with high rural populations.
“If you’re talking about Montana, for instance, their gun homicide rate is quite low but their gun death rate is among the highest in the country,” he said. “Connecticut now has the second-strongest gun laws in the nation and we also have the sixth-lowest rate of gun deaths in the nation. If it weren’t for Newtown, typically we’d have the third- or fourth-lowest rate.”
Gius also notes in the paper that gun laws are affected by loopholes and exemptions, and that for the purposes of the study, his paper assumes assault-weapons bans are the same from state to state (when they may not be). He concedes there that the study’s results may be because “the most violent states may also have the toughest gun control measures.”
Gius doesn’t think his paper alone supports public policy changes in regard to guns.
“I’m saying in my paper we need more research in this area,” Gius said. “Mine isn’t the first study on this topic. There are three or four that found that really restrictive laws either reduced the murder rate or had no effect on the rate. And then there are ... three or four that found the opposite, like mine.”
“The thing is, it’s just another data point in the spectrum of the research. It’s a good data point, I think... but ... it just calls for more reflection on this,” he said.
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