TY  - JOUR
AU  - Cook,Phillip J.
AU  - Ludwig,Jens
TI  - The Social Costs of Gun Ownership
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 10736
PY  - 2004
Y2  - September 2004
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10736
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10736.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Jens Ludwig
University of Chicago
1155 East 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Tel: 773/834-0811
Fax: 773/834-1582
E-Mail: jludwig@uchicago.edu
AB  - 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.
ER  -