More Guns - More Violence

I think you've heard the arguments before about...Good Guys with Guns.

If that is true, why are there 30,000 deaths a year from gun violence. Who, exactly, is being deterred?

Emily Badger's blog for the Washington Post questions the logic foisted by pro gun lobbyists.

More guns, less crime? Not exactly.

Pro gun lobbies like to cite research that more guns on the streets reduces gun violence. A 1997 paper by John Lott and David Mustard concluded that "concealed handguns are the most cost-effective method of reducing crime thus far analyzed by economists."

Not So Fast

Turns out Lott and his research have been discredited.  A more recent study written by Stanford's Abhay Aneja and John J. Donohue and  John Hopkins' Alexandria Zhang, goes one step further. It methodically picks apart the existing literature — including Lott's — and reaches a dramatically different conclusion:

Overall, the most consistent, albeit not uniform, finding to emerge from both the state and the county panel data models conducted over the entire 1977–2006 period with and without state trends and using three different models is that aggravated assault rises when [right-to-carry] laws are adopted.

In other words, more guns...more violence.