John R. Lott Jr.
IN January 1997, I published a paper in the Journal of Legal Studies on the consequences of legalizing concealed weapons. Using FBI crime data for all 3,054 U.S. counties from 1977 to 1992, I demonstrated that allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns deters violent crime and produces no significant increase in accidental handgun deaths. In addition, in counties which permitted citizens to arm themselves, murder rates fell by at least 8.5 per cent, aggravated assaults by 7 per cent, rapes by 5 per cent, and robberies by 3 per cent.
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