Deltoid

Tim Lambert *
Justin Lambert **
Daniel Lambert ***

Objective

To determine the relationship between gun brandishing and concealed carry laws.

Methodology

The frequency that mere brandishing was sufficient to scare off bad guys was obtained from statements made by John R. Lott Jr. The number of states with concealed carry laws at the time each statement was made was obtained from packing.org. The analysis also included demographic controls for age, race and gender using the 36 variables that Lott used in More Guns, Less Crime. Note that because all the statements were made by Lott there was no variation on race and age group and little on gender.

We counted each statement made by Lott as a independent observation. Because there were many repeated values, conventional statistical wisdom would tell us that the standard errors would be underestimated, but following the pathbreaking work of John Lott in More Guns, Less Crime, we ignore the problem. Plus, if we discard the duplicates, we only have six observations and the results aren't statistically significant.

A quadratic fit was first attempted to the data, but this did not have the policy implications that we wanted, so we went with a linear fit.

Results

A strongly statistically significant association (p<0.000001) was found between the brandishing frequency given by Lott and the number of states with concealed carry laws. The lower the number he stated, the more states adopted such laws.

Policy Implications

To achieve his goal of carry laws in all 50 states, Lott needs to adjust his brandishing number to 68.6705%. He could make this adjustment by conducting another survey, citing the results from other surveys, or just making up a new number.

Future work

Our model predicts that if Lott lowered his number to 60% there would be 55.5649 states with carry laws, implying that states in other countries would adopt such laws. We urge Dr Lott to conduct the experiment to find out where those states turn out to be.