More Readers of Gun Magazines But Not More Crimes

We investigate the relationships between gun ownership and murders, reported rapes, and robberies. We proxy gun ownership by the number of subscriptions to the gun magazine Handguns Magazine and accommodate the count nature of our data by analyzing them with a multivariate Poisson-lognormal model. For most of our analyses, we find that the correlation between today’s number of guns and future crimes is as strong as the correlation between today’s number of crimes and future guns. Reliance by previous research on sales of Guns&Ammo, the fourth largest gun magazine, is found to be problematic because of the large number of copies purchased by the magazine to guarantee the circulation promised to advertisers. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Codes: C35, K14.