Guns, Drugs and Juvenile Crime

Volokh posted a link on a firearms-related mailing list to a study on gun availability, drug use, and crime in juveniles. There are a number of obvious flaws that are worth pointing out.

"No support is found for the hypothesis that gun availability decreases the likelihood of being victimized": this should not surprise anyone, since they are working with a sample of high-school students for whom "having access to a gun at home" does not indicate that the gun is available for self-defense, whether inside or outside the home.

"In fact, the results show that having access to guns increases the probability of being cut or stabbed by someone and of someone pulling a knife or gun on the juvenile.": Again, this should not be surprising; juveniles in high-crime areas are probably highly correlated with juveniles in economically-depressed familys or regions. Families in high-crime areas are presumably more likely to have a gun around the house for self-defense and definitely more likely to store the gun in such a manner that it is readily accessible to a juvenile (as the cost of a secure gun safe is not trivial). Families composed of criminals owning illegal firearms are even more highly correlated with lack of safe storage methods and gun availability.

"gun availability at home increases the propensity to commit crime by about two percentage points for juveniles but has no impact on damaging property.": It's unclear what crimes they refer to or why they chose to exclude damaging property. Regardless, this is another unsurprising result: *Access* to firearms is likely to be highly correlated with living in a high-crime area and with being raised by criminals. Being raised by criminals will presumably have a fairly obvious crime-increasing effect on the juveniles so raised.

Why do I emphasize access? Because having a gun at home for most juveniles is not the same as either owning a gun or being able to use the gun. The juvenile cannot legally carry the gun, and will as a practical matter be prevented from doing so by the owner, regardless of the juvenile's perceived "access".

Additionally, in most cases, being "victimized" occurs whether or not you have a gun to protect you. If you are accosted by a criminal in a dark alley demanding your wallet (or your lunch money), you have been victimized, whether you use or display a firearm in self-defense or not. To properly analyze the benefits of gun ownership, an unbiased scientist cannot seek to use juvenile data and must distinguish between 1) events occurring inside or outside the home; 2) whether the victim had access to the firearm; 3) whether the firearm was legal or illegal.

Why must "illegal" guns (ie, guns possessed by prohibited persons, such as felons, as distinct from "banned guns" eg assault weapons) be distinguished? Because those illegal guns are highly correlated with a criminal upbringing, unsafe storage methods, and high-crime areas.

Failing to distinguish those factors will produce misleading results, as the people reading academic analyses of gun control and crime issues are presumably highly negatively correlated with illegal guns.

It's also interesting, given the expected dichotomy between illegal and legal guns, to question whether prohibitive gun control measures (ie, a ban on all firearms, or on handguns) would effectively turn "legal" guns into "illegal" guns; that is, once the gun is made illegal, do the negative traits correlated with (but not, I think, caused by!) the "availability" of those firearms become associated with the guns newly made illegal?

The hypothesized causes of the effect in that case are a criminal upbringing, unsafe storage methods, and a high-crime environment. By living in a house with an illegal firearm, even one in which the owners were otherwise perfectly responsible, could produce similar effects: a firearm concealed from the police is not stored in a gun safe; and a parent who commits a crime and conceals it from the police with the knowledge of his children is, to some degree, damaging their respect for the law.

Thus, we can speculate that banning firearms might actually have negative results. But there is as yet no evidence -- just a chain of hypotheticals.