The Social Costs of Gun Ownership
54 Pages Posted: 20 Sep 2004 Last revised: 3 Nov 2022
Date Written: September 2004
Abstract
This paper provides new estimates of the effect of household gun prevalence on homicide rates, and infers the marginal external cost of handgun ownership. The estimates utilize a superior proxy for gun prevalence, the percentage of suicides committed with a gun, which we validate. Using county- and state-level panels for 20 years, we estimate the elasticity of homicide with respect to gun prevalence as between +.1 and +.3. All of the effect of gun prevalence is on gun homicide rates. Under certain reasonable assumptions, the average annual marginal social cost of household gun ownership is in the range $100 to $600.
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
By Mark Duggan
-
Confirming More Guns, Less Crime
By John R. Lott, Florenz Plassmann, ...
-
State and Local Prevalence of Firearms Ownership: Measurement, Structure, and Trends
By Deborah Azrael, Philip J. Cook, ...
-
By Philip J. Cook, Jens Ludwig, ...
-
The Effects of Gun Prevalence on Burglary: Deterrence vs Inducement
By Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig
-
Pitfalls of Using Proxy Variables in Studies of Guns and Crime
-
Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns and Violent Crime: Crime Control Through Gun Decontrol?
-
The Final Bullet in the Body of the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis