John R. Lott, a Yale Law School senior research fellow, conducted one of the most comprehensive firearms research projects ever undertaken. The conclusion he reached -- that more guns in the hands of private citizens results in less crime -- predictably has sparked heated debate. In the latest edition of his book, "More Guns Less, Crime; Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws," Lott clearly presents his work and explains the nexus between concealed-weapon permits and crime rates.

Lott was interviewed by radio talk host Zoh Hieronimus, whose syndicated program The Zoh Show can be heard weekdays from 12-3 p.m., Eastern time.

Question: How did you get attracted to the subject of firearms ownership as it relates to crime?

Answer: I've done a lot of research on crime over the years. I've published about 80 academic papers. I've taught classes on crime. I've worked in the federal government dealing with crime and law enforcement type issues.

About seven years ago, I was teaching a class on crime at the University of Pennsylvania. It dawned on me after class that some of the students would be interested in papers on gun control. And while I had read a fair number of papers in the area, it forced me to systematically go through the literature. I guess I had always assumed that there must be a few good papers out there, but when I went through it, I was shocked to find that I couldn't find anything. I thought they were all very poorly done. They were very small samples.

By far, the largest paper on the issue of guns and crime had looked at 175 cities within just a single year. The next largest group of studies had looked at 24 counties or 24 cities in just a single year. Most of them would look at a couple of jurisdictions, or maybe just one. No previous study had even tried to account for things like arrest rates or conviction rates or prison sentence lengths in trying to explain changes in crime rate.

So, I decided rather than just going and picking out a few counties -- maybe 24 counties is a magical number -- I decided that I was going to get the data for all the counties in the United States for the years that it was available.

In the second edition of the book, I am examining crime rates as well as actual gun deaths and suicides for all the counties in the United States from 1977, when the data was released, to the end of 1996.

Q: At minimum, 60 percent of our federal inmate population are nonviolent offenders.

A: Yes, they are in for drug offenses. In fact, 10 percent are also in there for white-collar crimes. So, if you were to total all nonviolent offenders, I am sure you would be well over 70 percent.

Q: Explain to us your original questions, the thesis that you were proposing and trying to answer.

A: The bottom line question for me -- and I think for most people is: What's the net effect of gun ownership? Does it save lives or cost lives? We hear when bad things happen with guns, and guns make it easy for bad things to happen, but they also make it easier for people to defend themselves and prevent bad things from happening. We are constantly bombarded with news, information about bad things that happen with guns. Is it possible for people to go and pick up their newspapers in the morning or listen to the national evening news, or even the local evening news, and not hear something bad that has happened with a gun? But the best estimates indicate that people use guns defensively two million times a year. That's about five times more frequently than guns that are used to commit crimes.

Q: How would you define the overall findings of your research? What were the positive things coming out of your research concerning the use of a gun?

A: I didn't set out to find out what the positive things were. I set out to find out what's the net effect. Do they save lives or not? What I did find was surprising to me at the time and that was, on net, guns save many more lives than they take.

It's particularly the most vulnerable people in society -- people who are relatively weaker physically, like women and the elderly, or people who are the most likely to be victims of crime, particularly poor blacks who live in high crime urban areas -- who benefit the most from having a gun to protect themselves.

My research shows that the most important single factor for reducing crime are the police. I don't think there's any doubt about that. But I think the police also realize that they simply can't be there all the time, that they virtually always arrive on the crime scene after the crime's been committed. The question becomes, then, what do we advise people to do when they are having to confront a criminal by themselves? We consistently found that, by far, the safest course of action for someone to take is to have a gun.

Q: You point out the difference that owning a gun makes, especially in a woman's life.

A: Yes. Women, for example, who behave passively when they are confronted by a criminal are 2.5 times more likely to end up being seriously injured than a woman who has a gun. And the reason is pretty straightforward. You're talking about a female victim. The attackers are virtually always male. There's a large strength differential on average between a male attacker and a female victim. Other types of resistance -- using your fists, for example -- is very likely to lead to tragedy, because a female who uses her fist has a high probability of a physical response back from the attacker and a high probability of serious injury or death. While men also benefit from having a gun, the benefit isn't as large.

Q: Let's talk about concealed guns laws and crime rates and how they show up in the various states.

A: There are 31 states now that have so-called right-to-carry laws. These are laws that set certain objective criteria. Once you meet those, you can apply for a permit and then it's automatically granted. You have to be a certain age; you have to pay a fee; half the states require some type of training; and there are criminal background checks. What you find is that the states that issue the most permits, have the biggest drops in violent crime. For each additional year that these right-to-carry laws are in effect, you'll see an additional 1.5 percent drop in murder rates and about a three percent additional drop in rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults.

Q: How significant are these changes?

A: These are drops over and above the national declines in violent crimes that we have been observing in the U.S. since 1991. There are lots of reasons why crime has been falling. Given your discussion about drugs earlier, we've seen a huge drop in drug prices in the United States since 1991. There have been big changes in drug interdiction and most people, I think, don't appreciate how many murders, in urban areas in particular, are due to drug gangs fighting against each other in order to try and control drug turf. As the amount of drug interdiction has gone down, we have seen more drugs coming into the country from more sources -- and the profits that have been associated with the gangs controlling drug turf have gone down. So their incentive to fight against each other has gone down.

Q: Explain what that means in terms of the statistics you were looking at.

A: We've seen a drop in murder and other related violent crimes. While that explains the drop in major urban areas, like New York or Los Angeles or Houston, you see that even after you've tried to account for that, we've seen increased prison terms, an increase in arrests and conviction rates and some other changes in policing policy. But even after you try to account for those and literally hundreds of other factors, you'll see an even bigger drop in the states that have adopted these right-to-carry laws.

Q: What role has the medical community played in disinforming the public about the gun ownership issue?

A: I think there are lots of myths that have come out. I understand the medical community. They constantly see the bad things that happen with guns. They don't see the fact that someone hasn't come into the emergency room because they were able to use a gun to defend themselves. I think that constantly seeing the bad things that happen, and not seeing the benefits, cannot but help have some effect in terms of coloring people's views. I think it's the same effect we've observed nationally -- the press constantly covering the bad things and never covering the good things. When was the last time you watched the national evening news and there was a story on there about someone using a gun to go and save lives? It's just something you don't see. But also the quality of the statistical work and medical journals is often scarily bad.

Q: Give us an example of this problem and how it affects us.

A: I'll give you one claim that's been put out a lot in the press: that you're more likely, if you own a gun, to have someone in the home -- a loved one, yourself -- be killed by the gun than you are to use a gun to kill in self defense. That claim is probably the one that's gotten the most attention from medical journals. It's done by the same sets of authors. They look at one city or a few cities, over a year or a few-year period of time. And, just to let you know how they do the study, they'll identify people who died from a gunshot wound in or near a residence and then they'll ask the relatives of the deceased whether or not that person owned a gun. Then they'll assume that if the person owned a gun and if he or she died from a gunshot, then it was that gun that was used in the death.

When people have gone back and tried to check that, concretely, rather than just simply assume that there was that relationship, even including suicide, at most, 14 percent of the deaths could be attributed to the gun that was in the home. The other 86 percent were being falsely attributed to those weapons and were due to weapons being brought in from the outside. That, of course, raises the question: maybe the people had a good reason to own a gun in the home to begin with?

Q: And as you point out, the method they use for determining the benefit of owning a gun is absurd.

A: The benefits are only being counted as cases where you actually kill the intruder. That's extremely rare. Less than one out every thousand times people use guns defensively is the attacker killed. Ninety-eight percent of the time, simply being able to brandish a gun is sufficient to cause a criminal to break off an attack and the two percent of the time when guns are fired, the vast majority of those are warning shots. It's something like less than one-half-of-one percent of the time is the gun fired in the direction of the attacker. Even when they do hit, woundings are much more frequent than times when the attacker is killed.