Gun Audit

by David The changes in states’ right-to-carry (RTC) laws over the last few decades has been truly phenomenal. In  1986 , many conservative states such as Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas were “no-issue” states, meaning that a person was not legally permitted to carry a concealed weapon in public. Now, in  2023 , every state allows citizens to carry weapons in public with a permit, while 25 states do not require any permit to carry. This dramatic change in laws over the years has fueled  intense  academic and public debate over RTC laws and their effects on crime. More recently, since many states have been moving to  permitless  carry laws, a new debate has sparked: What effect do permitless carry laws have on crime rates? The first and most important thing that I will note is that there is currently no evidence that permitless carry laws increase the rate of gun carrying among criminals or non-criminals alike. Therefore, we have no real reason...

by David  Recently, the RAND Corporation released the Third Edition of their “Science of Gun Policy”  report . Essentially, the report sets criteria for what studies they choose to analyze, calculates their effect sizes (using  incident rate ratios  and confidence intervals). Then, based on the direction and size of the effect they judge whether the evidence for a relationship between a given law and a crime is “inconclusive,” “limited,” “moderate,” or “supportive.”    In this post, I want to focus on their evidence and conclusions they present in Chapter 18, their section on concealed carry laws. They present 12 studies on the effect of shall-issue or permitless carry vs. may- or no-issue laws. Only 3 studies find a homicide-increasing effect ( Fridel (2021) ,  French and Heagerty (2008) , and  Doucette, Crifasi, and Frattaroli (2019) ); all the other studies find no significant effect (e.g., the CI crosses 1.00). Interestingly, despite 75% of th...