TY - JOUR AU - Cook,Philip J. AU - Ludwig,Jens TI - The Effects of Gun Prevalence on Burglary: Deterrence vs Inducement JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 8926 PY - 2002 Y2 - May 2002 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8926 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8926.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Philip J. Cook Sanford School of Public Policy Duke University 215 Sanford Building Durham, NC 27708-0245 Tel: 919 613 7360 Fax: 919/681-8288 E-Mail: pcook@duke.edu 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 - The proposition that widespread gun ownership serves as a deterrent to residential burglary is widely touted by advocates, but the evidence is weak, consisting of anecdotes, interviews with burglars, casual comparisons with other countries, and the like. A more systematic exploration requires data on local rates of gun ownership and of residential burglary, and such data have only recently become available. In this paper we exploit a new well-validated proxy for local gun-ownership prevalence -- the proportion of suicides that involve firearms -- together with newly available geo-coded data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, to produce the first systematic estimates of the net effects of gun prevalence on residential burglary patterns. The importance of such empirical work stems in part from the fact that theoretical considerations do not provide much guidance in predicting the net effects of widespread gun ownership. Guns in the home may pose a threat to burglars, but also serve as an inducement, since guns are particularly valuable loot. Other things equal, a gun-rich community provides more lucrative burglary opportunities than one where guns are more sparse. The new empirical results reported here provide no support for a net deterrent effect from widespread gun ownership. Rather, our analysis concludes that residential burglary rates tend to increase with community gun prevalence. ER -