The Dodge City Conspiracy
by Drs Paul Gallant and Joanne Eisen
27 August 1998
Myths of old western violence give a facade of logic to arguments against concealed carry reform.
Florida's concealed-carry law went from "may issue" to "shall issue" in 1987. In plain English, this means that issuing authorities must provide a concealed-carry handgun license to all qualifies applicants, regardless of the ability to demonstrate "need" for such a license on the part of the applicant.
The change in Florida's law carried with it profound ramifications for the rest of the country, Indeed, other states began to follow suit, modeling their own concealed-carry laws on Florida's.
America's firearm-prohibitionists sought to stem a burgeoning tide of shall-issue initiatives, and zeroed in on Florida - which many of them referred to as "Dodge City East." Because, if they could demonise Florida's concealed-carry law, and conjure up all the harm it led to - real or imagined - they could get to all the others.
Typical of the attacks on the Florida law was a position of paper put out by the anti-self-defence Violence Policy Centre, charging that, by "1993 Florida had the highest violent crime of any state in the nation". The paper was entitled "Concealed Carry: The Criminal's Companion," and cited a University of Maryland study. It concluded:
"We find no support for the idea that laws (in Florida, Mississippi and Oregon) reduced homicides; instead, we find evidence of an increase in firearm murders."
A like-minded commentary appeared in the American Journal of Public Health in June 1997. It cited the same University of Maryland study, claiming:
"...shall-issue gun laws were associated with significant increases in firearm homicides...(and) Florida's shall-issue laws was associated with an increase in homicides for the state as a whole."
Believe the Lie
There's an art to lying.
Really good lying comes with a set of rules to master. The most important
one of all is this: Get the story straight! But the greater number of players,
the harder it becomes for everyone to stick to the same story.
America's firearm-prohibitionists are finding this out the hard way. A major problem is their Dodge-City prophesy is the claim that firearms in the hands of ordinary law-abiding citizens will cause the streets of America to run crimson with blood. Of course, the Dodge City prophesy was nothing more than a concoction of the firearm-prohibitionist's spin-meisters from the start.
As any competent student of history will tell you, Dodge City was far safer than Los Angeles, or Washington, D.C., or New York City are today, despite - or perhaps because of - unrestricted firearm ownership in the Old West.
In what may come as a shock to those who learned geography in grade school (at a time when schools were a place for learning), Dodge City found itself relocated from Kansas to Florida, just as magically as Dorothy found herself transported to mythical Oz. It happened sometime after 1987, when Florida's "shall-issue" concealed-handgun law went into effect.
The Truth Shall Set You Free
Fast forward to August
1996, and enter a new player into the firearm debate: Dr.John Lott. Lott didn't
have to worry about getting his story straight - he had no political axe to
grind. His story was based on "just the facts, ma'am" - to be exact, all the
facts about crime in the United States between 1977 and 1992 that he could
get his hands on!
Lott dropped a scientific bombshell on the political philosophy of civilian disarmament in his landmark study of concealed handguns in America, which was expanded in his new book, More Guns, Less Crime. Lott found that "allowing citizens without criminal records or histories of significant mental illness to carry concealed handguns ....saves lives." Further, "The increased presence of concealed handguns... does not raise the number of accidental deaths or suicides."
To the anti-gunners, that kind of talk has to be stopped dead in its tracks. Predicably, attacks against both Lott and his research came fast and furious.
The Dodge City example was a political hatchet job
One of these appeared
in the January 1998 issue of the Journal of Legal Studies, in an article by
researcher: Dan Black and Daniel Nagin. This time the firearm-prohibitionists
needed to show that Dodge City never really left Kansas.
In their political hatchet-job to discredit Lott's findings, Black and Nagin did exactly that - they ditched Lott's Florida data, claiming that all of his conclusions on deterrence were driven solely by "estimates that a 24.4 percent decline in murder accompanied the passage of (Florida's) right-to-carry law."
They needed to exclude the Florida figures - then play statistical games with the rest - in order to be able to make the claim that the deterrent effects Lott had found earlier simply evaporated. Perhaps they hoped the anti-self-defence lobby's relocation of Dodge City would be forgotten.
The Florida Cover-Up
Even before Black and
Nagin's piece appeared in the Journal of Legal Studies, Lott had addressed
the Florida "problem" in detail in More Guns, Less Crime, noting:
"This particular suggestion - that we should throw out the data for Florida, because the drop in violent crimes is so large that is affects the results - is very ironic ... If the Maryland study (cited by VPC) is to be believed, the inclusion of Florida must have biased my results in the opposite direction."
No matter how they tried - no matter how they ran Lott's numbers - Black and Nagin still could not demonstrate that harm was a by-product of the concealed-carry of handguns by law-abiding citizens. The best they could muster up was:
"We find no statistical significant evidence that right-to-carry laws have an impact on any of the crime rates."
The Truth Is Out There
Those of us who cherish
liberty are indebted to Dr. Lott for his insightful response to Black and
Nagin. Lott not only pointed out just how Black and Nagin doomed Dodge City,
he redefined the firearm debate, leaving proponents of civilian disarmament
in disarray. Lott noted:
"On the basis of Black and Nagin's comment and our original article, the choice is between concealed handguns either producing a deterrent effect or having no effect (one way or the other) on murders and violent crime generally. Even if this were the state of the current debate, it represents a big change in the bounds of the debate, where many academics have argued that more guns leads to more violence."
In their failed attempt to slam Lott and his research, Black and Nagin ignored the cardinal rule for maintaining the Dodge City lie - they couldn't keep the story straight - and wrote the epitaph for that mythical city.
On April 7,1998, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement announced that the state's murder rate had dropped again in 1997, just as it had in each of the previous five years. The additional 5.8 percent drop marked the lowest murder rate experienced by Dodge City "East" since 1933.
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