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Why The Nra Fights Background Checks, John J. Donohue Apr 2013

Why The Nra Fights Background Checks, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

"We think it's reasonable to provide mandatory instant criminal background checks for every sale at every gun show. No loopholes anywhere for anyone." Did President Barack Obama say that? No, that's from an advertisement taken out by the NRA in USA Today in 1999.

But a more powerful NRA today is in no mood to follow the slogan of their "be reasonable" ad campaign of 14 years ago. This relatively small group -- the NRA boasts that it has 4.5 million members, which is peanuts compared to the roughly 40 million AARP members -- might have the political power to …


Testimony In Support Of Connecticut Senate Bill 1035 And House Bill 6425, Abolishing The Death Penalty (2011), John J. Donohue Mar 2011

Testimony In Support Of Connecticut Senate Bill 1035 And House Bill 6425, Abolishing The Death Penalty (2011), John J. Donohue

John Donohue

In 1975, Isaac Ehrlich launched the modern econometric evaluation of the impact of the death penalty on the prevalence of murder with a controversial paper that concluded that each execution would lead to eight fewer homicides (Ehrlich 1975). A year later, the Supreme Court cited Ehrlich’s work in issuing an opinion ending the execution moratorium that had started with the 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia. Today it is widely recognized that Ehrlich's national time-series methodology is too unreliable to be published in any economics journal.

Over the last few years, a number of highly technical papers have purported to …


More Guns, Less Crime Fails Again: The Latest Evidence From 1977 – 2006, John Donohue, Ian Ayres Apr 2009

More Guns, Less Crime Fails Again: The Latest Evidence From 1977 – 2006, John Donohue, Ian Ayres

John Donohue

No abstract provided.


The Impact Of Legalized Abortion On Crime, John Donohue, Steven D. Levitt Apr 2001

The Impact Of Legalized Abortion On Crime, John Donohue, Steven D. Levitt

John Donohue

We offer evidence that legalized abortion has contributed significantly to recent crime reductions. Crime began to fall roughly eighteen years after abortion legalization. The five states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines earlier than the rest of the nation, which legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. States with high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crime reductions in the 1990s. In high abortion states, only arrests of those born after abortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states. Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime.