“America Is a Nation of High-Functioning Gun-aholics”

The LGM Podcast episode between Geoff Williams and myself led to some media attention which led to this article.

But two new academic papers posit that drug market dynamics alone don’t fully explain why the explosion of crack use was so deadly, nor why murders fell in the mid-90s. Instead, they argue, a boom in handgun production and possession gave the crack years their fatal character — until new restrictions on firearms reversed the trendlines.

“What’s striking about the gun market is you get these surges in production,” said Geoffrey Williams, an economist at Transylvania University in Kentucky who has been researching the phenomena for the past three years. “The production booms were followed by surges in killings.”