Economics in part is the analysis of how people respond to incentives (do high tax rates encourage or discourage work, do trade barriers increase or decrease prosperity, etc).
This type of analysis also applies to the study of crime.
For instance, do guns encourage crime (by giving bad people access to weapons) or discourage crime (by giving potential victims a means of protection)?
My view is that bad people will get guns, even if they are illegal. As such, the only real-world impact of gun control is that law-abiding people are made more vulnerable.
And that means more crime. In other words, crooks respond to incentives.
Let’s look at some new scholarly evidence. Alessandro Acquisti of Carnegie Mellon University and Catherine Tucker of MIT have produced a new study that investigates whether criminals respond to data regarding the likelihood of armed victims.
The main takeaway is that more guns is correlated with less crime.