A highly publicized study by John Lott and David Mustard, Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns, reports that right-tocarry laws reduce crime dramatically. This study concludes that if the states without right-to-carry laws had enacted them before 1992, the number of murders in the United States would have declined that year by 1414. This number would have dwarfed any conceivable increase in the number of accidental deaths by firearm that right-to-carry laws might have generated. Moreover, rapes would have declined by 4177, aggravated assaults by 60,363, and robberies by 11,898. Property crime would have increased substantially, for many criminals, fearful of their newly armed victims, would have switched from crimes of violence to crimes of stealth. The net economic savings generated by enacting right-to-carry laws throughout America would have been $5.47 billion.

Although I am not qualified to offer technical criticism of Lott and Mustard’s econometric work, I can offer a lawyer’s reaction to this work. Like other readers without Ph.D.’s who try to be intelligent consumers of empirical research, I sometimes find myself frustrated as social scientists talk of “feasible generalized least squares,” “two-stage least squares,” “ordinary least squares,” and “differences-in-differences-in-differences.” When, unlike the natural scientists whose papers also baffle me, the social scientists never (or almost never) reach consensus among themselves, I wonder whether responsible citizens and policymakers can do more than throw up their hands. I believe, however, that people like me are not helpless. I may not be knowledgeable enough to criticize Lott and Mustard’s methodology, but I can explain why I find their conclusions difficult to follow and difficult to swallow.