Does allowing people to own or carry guns deter violent crime? Or does it simply allow more citizens to harm one another? Legal scholar John Lott directly challenges our common perceptions about gun congrol and presents the most rigourous and comprehensive analysis ever done on crime statistics and right-to-carry laws. This timely, provocative work reaches a startling conclusion: more guns means less crime. In the new paperback edition, Lott has expanded the research to include the most up-to-date data now available from states that passed right-to-carry and other gun laws since the books publication as well as new city-level statistics.

John R. Lott Jr. was a resident scholar at AEI and a senior research scholar in the School of Law at Yale University. He was the chief economist at the U.S. Sentencing Commission during 1988 and 1989, and has published over eighty articles in academic journals. He is the author of Are Predatory Commitments Credible? Who Should the Courts Believe? published by the University of Chicago Press.