@article{ref1,
title="The social costs of gun ownership",
journal="NBER working papers series",
year="2004",
author="Cook, Philip J. and Ludwig, Jens",
volume="2004",
number="online",
pages="w10736-w10736",
abstract="This paper provides new estimates of the effect of household gun prevalence on homicide rates, and infers the marginal external cost of handgun ownership. The estimates utilize a superior proxy for gun prevalence, the percentage of suicides committed with a gun, which we validate. Using county- and state-level panels for 20 years, we estimate the elasticity of homicide with respect to gun prevalence as between +.1 and +.3. All of the effect of gun prevalence is on gun homicide rates. Under certain reasonable assumptions, the average annual marginal social cost of household gun ownership is in the range $100 to $600.  Published: Cook, Philip J. and Jens Ludwig. &quot;The Social Costs Of Gun Ownership,&quot; Journal of Public Economics, 2006, v90(1-2,Jan), 379-391.<p />",
language="en",
issn="0898-2937",
doi="",
url="http://dx.doi.org/"
}