Guns and Homicides: A Multiscale Geographically Weighted Instrumental Variables Approach

Abstract

This article assesses the locally varying effects of gun ownership levels on total and gun homicide rates in the contiguous United States using cross-sectional county data for the period 2009-2015. Employing a multiscale geographically weighted instrumental variables regression that takes into account spatial nonstationarity in the processes and the endogenous nature of gun ownership levels, estimates show that gun ownership exerts spatially monotonically negative effects on total and gun homicide rates, indicating that there are no counties supporting the "more guns, more crime" hypothesis for these two highly important crime categories. The number of counties in the contiguous United States where the "more guns, less crime" hypothesis is confirmed is limited to at least 1258 counties (44.8% of the sample) with the strongest total homicide-decreasing effects concentrated in southeastern Texas and the deep south. On the other hand, stricter state gun control laws exert spatially monotonically negative effects on gun homicide rates with the strongest effects concentrated in the southern tip of Texas extending toward the deep south.

A scoping review on the multiplicity of scale in spatial analysis

“…A scoping review on the multiplicity of scale in spatial analysis 2012; Brown 2017;Jendryke and McClure 2019;Hazell and Rinner 2019) and because of its novelty, there were fewer examples using MGWR (Fotheringham et al 2017;Wolf et al 2018;Murakami et al 2019;Bilgel 2020;Shabrina et al 2021;Forati and Gose 2021;Fotheringham et al 2021), though the number was increasing in recent years, along with methodological enhancements and computational improvements (Wu et al 2019c(Wu et al , 2021a(Wu et al , 2021bYu et al 2020;Zhang et al 2021a, b;Hagenauer and Helbich 2021).…”