Gun laws and gold medals (WS)

Summary

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More or Less: "Gun Laws and Gold Medals"

BBC Radio 4 | Hosted by Tim Harford | Air Date: July 28, 2012

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Episode Overview

This episode of More or Less puts a statistical lens on two key topics: the complex debate over gun control in the United States following the Colorado cinema shooting, and the evolution of Olympic achievement and national participation over the last century. The team unpacks the often cited statistics behind these issues, separating fact from conjecture, and explores how numbers are used—sometimes misleadingly—in these high-profile debates.

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Segment 1: Gun Laws, Crime, and Statistical Complexity

(00:12–06:25)

Main Theme

Exploring whether stricter gun laws actually lead to fewer gun deaths, through discussion of data, methodology, and the pitfalls of causality.

Key Discussion Points

• Contrasting Gun Ownership and Crime (00:52)

  • Britain vs US: US has "between 90 and 100 guns for every 100 people," while England and Wales have just 6.6.
  • Gun murders: US has "nearly three murders with guns for every 100,000 people each year"—40 times higher than in England and Wales.

• Correlation Does Not Imply Causation (01:28–02:40)

  • Quote – Professor Dan Polsby (01:28):
    “There are more guns in this country than there were 30 years ago by a lot...that’s what crime can be traced back to. And yet our homicide rate today is half what it was in 1980. So having more guns out there is consistent with a falling homicide rate.”
  • Polsby notes, however, that "correlation...doesn't mean causation" and speculates that prohibitory laws might backfire if law-abiding citizens disarm while criminals do not.

• Influence of John Lott’s Study (03:08–03:43)

  • Lott compiled comprehensive US crime data from 1977 to 1992 to analyze the effect of gun laws.
  • He claimed the only significant effect was from "right to carry" laws, which, he argued, slightly reduced violent crime rates.
  • Quote – John Lott (03:08):
    “There's only really one type of gun control law that seemed to produce any type of benefits, and that was the passage of these right to carry [laws].”

• Methodological Criticism and Reanalysis (04:16–05:15)

  • Professor John Donohue critiqued Lott's method, especially using the “ratio of arrests to murders,” since multiple arrests can occur per murder, potentially distorting the analysis.
  • Adjusting these factors can diminish or even reverse Lott's conclusions; some analyses find gun robberies rise post "right to carry" laws.
  • The time frame considered critically affects the apparent outcomes.

• No Clear Causal Link (05:43)

  • The 2004 National Academy of Sciences review concluded that evidence is insufficient to determine causality between "right to carry" laws and crime rates.

• Enduring Political Dimension (06:14)

  • Quote – Professor Dan Polsby (06:14): “People in this country by overwhelming majorities believe in the second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms.”
  • The debate remains highly political since belief in constitutional rights supersedes ambiguous statistical findings.

Memorable Moment

• (05:15) Professor Donohue:
  Imagines ideal experimental design: “If we had said to those 38 [states], well, why don't half of you adopt it and then we'll compare in five years, then we'd have a nice answer to this question.”

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Segment 2: Olympic Achievement—Performance and Participation over a Century

(06:29–08:45)

Main Theme

A brief, engaging look at how Olympic performances and global participation have evolved from 1908 to 2008, using statistics to highlight dramatic changes.

Key Discussion Points

• Improvement in Athletic Standards (07:03–07:50)

  • Compared to today, athletic performances in 1908 were much slower.
  • Quote – Co-Host/Expert (07:18):
    “When Kenenisa Bekele broke the 5,000 meter record in the 2008 Games...he was running fast enough to have won the 1500 metres in 1908… Constantina Tomescu won the [2008] marathon—she would have won the men's event in 1908 by a clear half hour.”

• Rising Global Participation (07:50–08:31)

  • Growth from a handful of countries to far broader participation; the Olympic rings' designer in 1914 referenced just 14 nations.
  • Yet, as of 2012, Africa is still underrepresented relative to population, though countries like Kenya, Ethiopia, and Zimbabwe win more medals per athlete sent.

Memorable Moment

• Charming finish line anecdote (08:31–08:45):
  • The hosts humorously "race" to a nearby wine bar from the original 1908 finishing line, highlighting the distance (just "50 yards").

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Notable Quotes and Attributions

• “So having more guns out there is consistent with a falling homicide rate.”
  — Professor Dan Polsby, (01:28)

• “There's only really one type of gun control law that seemed to produce any type of benefits, and that was the passage of these right to carry [laws].”
  — John Lott, (03:08)

• “People in this country by overwhelming majorities believe in the second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms.”
  — Professor Dan Polsby, (06:14)

• “When Kenenisa Bekele broke the 5,000 meter record in the 2008 Games...he was running fast enough to have won the 1500 metres in 1908.”
  — Olympic Statistics Expert, (07:18)

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Important Timestamps

• 00:12–06:25 – Gun laws debate, comparative numbers, academic research, and controversy
• 06:29–08:45 – Olympic progress: performance increases, global expansion, and medal statistics

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Takeaways

• Scientific and statistical evaluation of policies like gun control is fraught with methodological challenges, confounded by political values and interpretive disputes.
• Olympic benchmarks have dramatically shifted over the century owing to increased global participation and improved standards, though inequalities in representation persist.
• More or Less offers accessible, skeptical analysis, questioning both the numbers and the narratives that often dominate public debate.

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Transcript

[BBC Announcer]

Thank you for downloading from the BBC. For details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use, go to bbcworldserveys.com podcasts

[Tim Harford]

hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. A Statistical spotlight on a World of Numerical confusion Last week's mass shooting at a cinema in Colorado has, not surprisingly intensified America's bitter and long running argument with itself that about gun control. The Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, has called on President Obama and Mitt Romney to make gun control an election issue. The argument is political and highly partisan, but it's also practical. Would tighter gun laws actually lead to fewer gun deaths? You might think it's obvious that they would, but as Wesley Stevenson's been finding out, the evidence isn't quite that clear.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Think about Britain and the US there are between 90 and 100 guns for every 100 people in the US there are just 6.6 in England and Wales. In the US there are nearly three murders with guns for every 100,000 people each year. That's 40 times more than in England and Wales. Ergo, fewer guns equal fewer incidents of gun crime, right? Well, maybe. But consider this stat from Professor Dan Polsby D. Dean of the Law School at George Mason university in the USA, who wrote a famous article in the mid-90s called the False Promise of Gun Control.

[Professor Dan Polsby]

There are more guns in this country than there were 30 years ago by a lot. And most of the new inventory are handguns, which everybody says those are the evil guns. That's what crime can be traced back to. And yet our homicide rate today is half what it was in 1980. So having more guns out there is consistent with a falling homicide rate.

[Narrator/Reporter]

But Professor Polsby isn't foolish and realises that there's a lot more at play here. Of course, correlation as we know, doesn't mean causation. But he thinks there may be some link between the two, and this is his reasoning.

[Professor Dan Polsby]

People that are less likely to obey those laws may be less likely to obey other kinds of laws, including committing crimes with guns. So you could have a prohibitory law that actually decreases the amount of firearms holding in a given geographic jurisdiction, perversely has the effect of creating more crime out of that because the people that have turned in their guns are the ones that want to use it for legitimate self defense and the people that have retained their guns by tautology are the mischief makers.

[Narrator/Reporter]

While this has some logic to it, when he first wrote his influential article back in the 1990s, there was little empirical evidence on the issue of gun control. That was until a man called John Lott came along. What he wanted to do was look at what happened before and after states introduced gun control laws. So he compiled crime data for all the counties in the United States between 1977 and 1992, and looked at the difference various gun control laws made.

[John Lott]

Amazing thing. Prior to my research, none of the research on gun control had accounted for any law enforcement activity. So I try to account for things like arrest rates, conviction rates, prison sentence lengths, the death penalty. And then you have demographics. Income, poverty, unemployment, Literally hundreds of different factors that were included, as well as the different types of gun control laws. And what struck me was that there's only really one type of gun control law that seemed to produce any type of benefits, and that was the passage of these. Right to character.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Right to carry laws are laws that allow citizens to buy and carry guns, specifically handguns. When this research came out, it had a profound effect on the gun control debate, and unsurprisingly, it was jumped upon by the gun lobby. Now, while the downturn in violent crime was significant, it was still quite small, between 6 to 8%. Other researchers began to question the results, and one man who did so was Professor John Donahue and an economist and lawyer from Stanford University. He says that although Lott controlled for a lot of factors, he didn't agree with all of them.

[Professor John Donohue]

John Lott was using the ratio of arrests to murders when he tried to explain the number of murders in a state. But if you look at that ratio of arrests to murders, that ratio is frequently greater than one, because frequently many people are arrested for a single murder. And Lott was just using the total number of arrests and dividing it by the total number of murders.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Now, this may seem a little arcane, but if you change even just this controlling factor, it changes the results and makes them much less significant. And in some cases proves the opposite point, showing violent crime, particularly robbery with guns, rises when right to carry laws are introduced. Another factor is the time frame you use. Professor Donoghue also ran the figures over a longer time frame and and saw the effects of the laws diminish. John Lott ran a longer but different timeframe, and he said it backed his original research. And herein lies the problem.

[Professor John Donohue]

It is incredibly difficult to tease out these causal relationships. Ideally, you'd like to have the law implemented in a random fashion. So let's say I think there is something like 38 states now that have adopted right to carry laws. If we had said to those 38 states, well, why don't half of you adopt it and then we'll compare in five years, then we'd have a nice answer to this question.

[Narrator/Reporter]

When the National Academy of Sciences looked at the literature back in 2004, including John Lott's work and John Donoghue's research, they concluded that it was not possible to determine that there was a causal link between the passage of right to carry laws and crime rates. The gun lobby in the US and John Lott himself criticised the panel for being too anti gun. And this is the further problem. Even if it was proved that more guns meant more crime, it probably wouldn't make a lot of difference to the levels of gun control. As Professor Polsby points out, people in

[Professor Dan Polsby]

this country by overwhelming majorities believe in the second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms.

[Narrator/Reporter]

So into the void left by inconclusive figures, steps, politics and conjecture.

[Tim Harford]

Wesley Stevenson the more or less travel

[Oliver Hawkins]

budget doesn't often allow us to get out and about, but this week we've made an exception. And I am standing on the site of the finishing line of the 1908 Olympic Games, which sounds all very impressive until you realise it's about 10 seconds walk from our offices in White City in West London. The still London's changed a great deal and Britain's changed a great deal since 1908, and so has the Olympic Games. And to mark that fact, the House of Commons Library has published a rather

[Tim Harford]

beautiful book called Olympic Britain.

[Oliver Hawkins]

Oliver Hawkins, formerly of more or less now at the House of Commons Library and one of the authors of this book. Ollie objectively speaking, the performances in 1908, they weren't really up to much bar modern standards.

[Co-Host/Guest Expert]

No, I think one of the most interesting things about how the Games has changed over the last hundred years is the extent to which performances have improved. And you can see that in the record progression to give you a sense of just how much athletes have improved over the period. When Kenenisa bekele broke the 5,000 meter record in the 2008 Games in Beijing, he was running fast enough to have won the 1500 metres in 1908. Similarly, when Constantina Dieta Tomescu won the marathon in the 2008 Games, she would have won the men's event in 1908 by a clear half hour.

[Oliver Hawkins]

Maybe part of the reason that the 1908 times weren't that impressive was that actually a lot of countries didn't really take part fully.

[Co-Host/Guest Expert]

No, that's right. Participation in the Games has gone up enormously over the last hundred years and in fact when the Olympic flag, as we currently know it, was first presented to the International Olympic committee committee in 1914, its designer said that the colors of the rings represented all of the nations of the world and then went on to list just 14 countries. And even to this day, Africa is underrepresented in terms of the number of athletes it sends ahead of population. And yet countries like Kenya, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe continue to outperform Western countries in terms of the number of gold medals they win per athlete that they send.

[Oliver Hawkins]

Ok, Ollie, well, on that final thought, we're standing with our toes on the finishing line. I've got the wine bar in my sights. I think it's about 50 yards. I reckon I could be there in six seconds. Ready, steady, go.

[Tim Harford]

Oliver Hawkins, who lost, incidentally. That's all we have time for this week. Please keep your questions, comments and suggestions coming in to more or lessbc.co.uk. and we have a brand new website with print versions of our best stories. It's BBC.co.uk more or less. Please check it out and perhaps subscribe to our chart topping podcast. Until next week, goodbye.

[Producer/Editor Announcement]

More or Less was presented by Tim Harford, the Financial Times undercover economist. The producer was Richard Knight and the editor was Richard Varden.

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