Free More Guns Less Crime by John R. Lott Jr Page B

discretion in granting permits, and lowest in states with nondiscretionary rules.
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    Figure 3.5. U.S. crime rates from 1960—1996 (from FBI's Uniform Crime Reports)
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    Figure 3.5. Continued

    I I States with nondiscretionary rules or no permit requirements || States with discretionary rules | States forbidding concealed handguns
    Figure 3.6. State concealed-handgun laws as of 1996
    Table 3.2 Crime rates in states and the District of Columbia that do and do not allow the carrying of concealed handguns (1992)
    GUN OWNERSHIP, GUN LAWS, DATA ON CRIME/47
    The difference is quite striking: violent crimes are 81 percent higher in states without nondiscretionary laws. For murder, states that ban the concealed carrying of guns have murder rates 127 percent higher than states with the most liberal concealed-carry laws. For property crimes, the difference is much smaller: 24 percent. States with nondiscretionary laws have less crime, but the primary difference appears in terms of violent crimes.
    Since the primary data that we will focus on are at the county level, we are asking whether crime rates change in counties whose states adopt nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws. We are also asking whether the crime rates change relative to other changes in counties located in states without such laws. Using a reference library (Lexis/Nexis) that contains an extensive collection of news stories and state laws, I conducted a search to determine the exact dates on which these laws took effect. In the states that adopted the laws during the year, the effects for their counties were scaled to equal that portion of the year during which the laws were in effect. Because of delays in implementing the laws even after they went into effect, I defined counties in states with nondiscretionary laws as being under the these laws beginning with the first full year for which the law was in effect. While all the tables shown in this book use the second measure, both measures produced similar results.
    The number of arrests and offenses for each type of crime in every county from 1977 to 1992 was provided by the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports; in addition, however, I contacted the state department of corrections, attorney general, secretary of state, and state police offices in every state in an effort to compile data on conviction rates, sentence lengths, and concealed-weapons permits by county. The Bureau of Justice Statistics also released a list of contacts in every state that might provide state-level criminal justice data. Unfortunately, county data on the total number of outstanding concealed-carry pistol permits were available only for Arizona, California, Florida, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington, and time-series county data before and after a change in the law were only available for Arizona (1994-96), Oregon (1990-92), and Pennsylvania (1986—92). Since the Oregon nondiscretionary law was passed in 1990, I sought data on the number of permits in 1989 by calling up every county sheriff in Oregon, and 25 of the 36 counties provided that information. (The remaining counties stated that records had not been kept.) 13 For Oregon, data on county-level conviction