Effect of Kennesaw law on burglaries

brian.m.leary said:

In the five months after the passage of the mandatory gun ownership
law in Kennesaw, Georgia the residential burglary rate was down
89% from the same period the year before. Does this prove the
law worked? No - proof is difficult in these matters.

However, is it clear that the law had no effect? Hardly.

The source for this claim appears to be Kleck's paper in "Social
Problems" v35p15, where he states there were five reported residential
burglaries in the seven months after the law, while there were 45 in
the corresponding seven months of the preceding year.

As you have noted, this isn't enough data to conclude if the law did
or did not have an effect. Sure, there is a big reduction, but how do
we know that before year was not unusually high?

If the sequence is
7 43 4 5 6 45 5

we certainly wouldn't conclude that the law caused the reduction.

However, there is a MUCH more serious problem with this 89% reduction
claim. From the "Criminology" v29p541 paper by McDowall et al (which
provides monthly totals) I computed the total number of burglaries in
the seven months after the law (23) and for the seven corresponding
months of the previous year (37). Something is wrong here. It's
possible that 5 out of 23 burglaries after the law were residential
but it sure as hell ain't possible for 45 out of 37 burglaries before
to be residential. One dataset must be wrong.

McDowall et al's data come from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports.
Kleck's data comes from a telephone conversation somebody else had
with the Kennesaw police chief.

I think the UCR data is likely to more accurate.

Tags

More like this

On pages 136-138 of "Point Blank" Kleck discusses Kennesaw burglaries. He states that after Kennesaw passed a (purely symbolic) law requiring a gun in every household, residential burglaries fell by 89%. His explanation for this decrease is that publicity about the law reminded criminals of the…
brian.m.leary said: The residential burglary rate in Kennesaw, Georgia dropped sharply after a city ordinance requiring heads of household to keep at least one firearm in their homes was passed. The law passed early in 1982. In 1986 the rate was still down 85% compared to 1981. (1) This statistic…
In an opinion piece in the New York Times Glenn Reynolds claims: Last month, Greenleaf, Idaho, adopted Ordinance 208, calling for its citizens to own guns and keep them ready in their homes in case of emergency. ... And it may not be a bad idea. While pro-gun laws like the one in Greenleaf are…
Frank Crary said: [Kennesaw] was a response to Morton Grove's gun ban. Guess which "worked" better? If by "worked" you mean that crime rates were lower after the relevant law than before, the answer is Morton Grove. I'd like to see some data to back up this assertion: Specifically, data…