A recent story in the broadcast "butterfly effect" of 6 February on Canal Plus has given me the clear idea of the ticket today. This documentary focused on the growing involvement of imitation firearms plastic in the robberies. A tragic broke the story, a robber was shot dead by police who had then reported the outcome of events that it did not point a plastic gun at her.
As stated in a police report in question, the penal code in fact does not distinguish between a toy gun and a real weapon in the assessment of a situation of legitimate defense. Therefore if you focus a policeman with a toy gun and he shot us felt threatened, then nothing can be opposed to its instrument. Besides, Article 338 of the Penal Code, according to what is said in the story (I am not a lawyer, so I hope this is true), does not distinguish between a sentence under pointing a toy gun or a real weapon: it is potentially twenty years' imprisonment together with d a fine of 150,000 euros. From there, a deputy PS, Bruno Le Roux, based on examples from Canada, Switzerland and Belgium, is pushing for the adoption of a law requiring manufacturers of replica firearms to distinguish them from real weapons by adding a specific color, pattern, etc.. This would make it impossible to potential confusion between the two types of weapons to any person whatsoever.
Everything seems based on sound common sense, except that at the end of the story, I could hardly understand the interest due to such a degree that would be the point of view of welfare being of society. Testimony indeed troubled me: a robber, clearly professional, explained that he forced himself to use fake weapons as well as he would be unable to pull the person threatened in case of reaction on his part aggression. Even when you're a pro at turning, with fear and adrenaline rush to own the situation of aggression, it is easy "he said to press the trigger inconsiderately. This allowed him to avoid potentially life sentence in fatal cases for the injured person. He therefore saw these fake weapons as a means to help himself to give in to his own panic to avoid the tragic consequences of a robbery carried out with real firearms and that goes wrong. His reasoning seemed could not be more rational.
Why? Unless we assume that the availability of imitation weapons relatively cheaper and easier to get than the actual weapons shoot the robbers or other small offenders in the act, which may be true, I could not help thinking that the rules intended to prevent the use of imitation weapons in true crime could cause more harm than positive effects.
Consider the impact of regulation reproductions of imitation weapons, which totally prevents using them to seriously threaten anybody. With regard to the professional robbers, it will not change much in their activity, except that the rising cost of a weapon, it might even push them to increase the number of robberies. This reminded me an example that illustrates the excellent textbook introduction to microeconomics Andrew Schotter I liked to show my students, and he calls the paradox of Delinquency Prevention . The offender is described, to borrow the idea advanced by Gary Becker, a homo economicus who must decide whether to arbitrate the use of his time between legal activities and illegal activities. Obviously, these activities have direct and indirect costs, opportunity for example. Therefore, increased police resources and the probability of being caught and jailed will generate as usual in the standard model of consumer two types of effects, a substitution effect and an income effect (see figure below).
Suppose that an individual , who has the choice between criminal activities and legal activities and shall allocate its endowment given once and for all time (8 hours per day for example) between these two activities. Each activity gives it a different remuneration, wm wage illegal activities (rogue) and wh honest wage activities. Call p the expected value risk of being caught and punished for illegal activities, p is constant, but the more the individual allocates his time in corrupt activities and the greater the chances of being caught in total (p is a unit cost). p can also be seen as a cost related to the exercise of criminal activity, such as the cost of weapons that I get, false papers, various information, etc.. Therefore, for each unit obtained wage dishonest, I must deduct the cost of production activity dishonest and the expected cost of being caught and punished.
If the government adopts a regulation that prevents any offender to use a toy gun, this means that p increases, assuming that the real weapons are more expensive than imitation weapons to be acquired through criminal activity, this that seems pretty obvious. In this case, if the cost to produce a deflection increases, then it can dissuade me from doing robberies and then increase the honest part of my work: it is the substitution effect (ES on the graph, it increasing the number of hours that I affect the business honest). But as the cost of dishonest activity increases, the compensation the two activities do not change, it also produces an effect on my income: All other things being equal, my real income decreases because if the production cost of dishonest activity has increased, the benefit I get out of honest and dishonest business does has not changed. I'm more guillemées between "poor" (I try to be as intuitive as possible, sorry to microeconomist "serious that I would read it). This effect of drop my real income may push me to compensate for increasing the number of hours that I affect the activity dishonest. It is the income effect. In this case, the substitution effect causes the individual to be more honest, but the income effect pushes the contrary to be less. As the income effect is more important here (it pushes the individual left on the x-axis) than the substitution effect (which pushes it right on the x-axis on the graph), the total effect is that the individual increases his dishonest activities.
The total net effect of the new regulation is here negative: more repression means more illegal activities. In this sense it is paradoxical, because in making it more costly activity criminal, criminals were encouraged to increase their final effort in this activity. In fact, this means that criminal activities are a Giffen good, that is to say a good whose demand increases when the price (or cost) of the property increases, which is the opposite of idea that one has on the demand for goods called "normal". This is apparently a vision entirely possible and serious criminal activities, as this article shows very recent ( here Michael Cain, 2009, Crime Is a Giffen Good? ", Journal of Financial Crime ). In fact, Battalio et al, 1991, "Experimental Confirmation Of The Existence Of A Giffen Good," American Economic Review, showed that the existence of Giffen effects (a demand for a good increases when its price increases) could be observed in the laboratory. Giffen These effects are also much more frequent than what economists usually assume, based generally on the assumption that a demand for goods decreases with the price. Battalio et al. , 1991 in particular stressed the fact that it is not so much to say that such and such property is inherently Giffen, but only for certain levels of price and income, many goods can be "local" property Giffen, as already noted Jack Hirschleifer.
I therefore could not help but think of this example certainly intriguing and somewhat artificial, few empirically based, but put his finger on the perverse effects of public policies incorrectly assessed, based on seems like common sense to do that member. I'm not saying he's wrong, of course, I have no serious study on hand-but one which he correctly assesses the full impact of this legislation it wants to pass? Nothing is less certain ... Rely solely on common sense and morality seems to me so extremely risky, especially when the lives of those assaulted is at stake
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