Do armed citizens deter crime?

Fresno Bee columnist Bill McEwen came out in favor of the Sheriff’s policy of freely granting concealed weapon permits to qualified citizens in his piece published December 10, 2009. The incident that triggered his column was the murder of a delivery truck driver who was shot while doing his early morning rounds.

These tragedies always raise the question of what could have prevented them. Mr. McEwen suggests that more armed citizens of good character could deter at least some of these crimes. Others have the same thought, airline pilots included, so it is worth examining the research available to see if there is a correlation between more guns in the hands of good people and less violent crime.

In the interests of full disclosure, I grew up with guns and am a pretty good shot. As a Vietnam-era Air Force officer I qualified with a sidearm, putting fifty shots in an area the size of my fist. I have also worked around the world in places where order has broken down and have eaten dinner with people carrying automatic weapons.

The goal of research in this area of inquiry is to compare violent crime rates in areas with lots of guns and areas with few guns to see if there are differences. Brandon S. Centerwall did a study of homicide rates from 1976-80 in adjoining states and Canadian provinces. The provinces had one tenth as many handguns per capita as the states. Centerwall states: “No consistent differences were observed; criminal homicide rates were sometimes higher in the Canadian province, and sometimes higher in the adjoining US state.”

Mauser and Kates studied international data and summed up their study in 2006: “Our conclusion from the available data is that suicide, murder and violent crime rates are determined by basic social, economic and/or cultural factors with the availability of any particular one of the world’s myriad deadly instrument being irrelevant.”

Lott and Mustard examined a large data set of all US counties and determined that easing carry laws to put more guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens did decrease violent crime. These findings were widely celebrated and resulted in passage of carry laws in a number of states.

Ayres and Donohue examined Lott and Mustard’s data set and added in data from states where eased concealed weapons rules made firearms more common. Their conclusion published in the 2003 Stanford Law Review was: “We conclude that Lott and Mustard have made an important scholarly contribution in establishing that these laws have not led to the massive bloodbath of death and injury that some of their opponents feared. On the other hand, we find that the statistical evidence that these laws have reduced crime is limited, sporadic, and extraordinarily fragile.”

Scholars continue to study this issue which has large implications for our society. At present there are studies which seem to show less crime where citizens are armed, but these results do not hold up well to scrutiny. Those places which freely grant concealed weapons permits are the test beds where theories meet data. Fresno, with ten percent of the state’s concealed carry permits, is one of those test beds.

The practical question is whether the citizens of Fresno are better off being a test bed for the proposition that more armed citizens deter crime. Ayres and Donohue go on to state that: “While we do not want to overstate the strength of the conclusions that can be drawn from the extremely variable results emerging from the statistical analysis, if anything, there is stronger evidence for the conclusion that these laws increase crime than there is for the conclusion that they decrease it.”

Social experiments are a necessary part of governing any society. The only way to find out whether a theory works is to try it. The more data you have from places that have already tested the theory the better your decision whether or not to try it yourself. Where the test results are as equivocal as they are in the area of arming private citizens, how does one decide which path to follow? Scholars will be glad to receive the data from the Fresno experiment.

(a version of this blog post was published by Fresno Pacific University as part of its Scholars Speak series of faculty writing in January 2010)

Hacking Google

Who hacked Google? Gmail accounts were the targets, as far as public press releases show. Google says the hackers were Chinese, as does the US government. China responds that its government had nothing to do with it, and how dare you say it did?

We only know that Google was hacked because it says so. Google also says that Chinese dissidents were the ones targeted. Let's assume that they are telling the truth as far as they know it. Do governments have teams of computer hackers busily preparing for cyber-war and testing their abilities in the meantime? One assumes that they do, and Americans would be dismayed to learn that their government wasn't doing just that. The way you learn to break into computer networks is by breaking into computer networks, the tougher the better.

Internet security companies are also busily probing for security holes, as are fascinated amateurs, professional sleuths and criminal gangs. The complexity of modern software and the worldwide distribution of its creation and manufacture pretty much guarantee that there will always be security holes. Any computer network is as secure as its weakest link, and one unpatched computer is all it takes to let in the bad guys.

So who hacked Google? Writers have been pointing out that there are many people and groups who could benefit from successfully hacking those Gmail accounts. Google's competitors in China would certainly benefit if Gmail seemed insecure, and for that matter Google's competitors outside China would also benefit. Google has been getting steadily bigger and its reach into new markets and technologies is astounding. As it moves more people into the cloud computing realm the market for free-standing individual software goes down.

Already anyone with a decent internet connection can avoid buying any software and still be productive. Google even has a free operating system for you, and it isn't alone. How do you stop the Google juggernaut? If people's faith in the security and stability of Google's applications is compromised, what will happen?

Google has a lot to lose in this whole hacking scandal, and many people and groups benefit from its loss. For us end-users the moral of the story is simple: no electronic communication is safe from prying eyes. Even strong encryption is only as secure as its password, which can be obtained by cleverness, deception or stealth in many cases. We can only be secure from casual trespassers, not unlike a locked house. As with a locked house, our online financial transactions can be burgled. We have insurance for both since neither can ever be completely secure.

I take reasonable precautions, patching my software and keeping my anti-virus software up to date. I also don't wander around in bad internet neighborhoods. I have still been a victim of cyber theft, which I only discovered by checking my credit card statements. I know that the IT staff can read my mail, so I don't send anything I don't want read. My greatest risk is an unplanned "reply all." We are probably better off thinking of the internet as a party-line phone, and using it accordingly.

So who hacked Google? It doesn't matter, and no one can ever know for sure anyway. If Google decides not to compete in China that is their business decision. Some people got a wake-up call from the event, and that may be a good thing for all of us.