Florida Proposes Constitutional Carry

by David

In Florida, the speaker of the House, Paul Renner, just introduced a bill that would make Florida a permitless or "Constitutional Carry" state. This means that Florida would join 25 other states in establishing this type of law.

As for the empirics, I go through them in this post here on Gun Audit. Overall, I come to the conclusion that we don't have enough data to make definitive claims about the likely effects of the law. However, we do know about the effects of shall-issue or right-to-carry (RTC) laws, where one has to obtain a permit before legally concealed carrying in public. 

I have a feeling that, if the bill passes, the same type of scenario is going to play out as when Florida passed its RTC law in 1987: politicians and pro-control advocates claiming the law will send crime soaring and the crime rate not ending up soaring. 

Here, using the CDC WONDER database, I graph out Florida vs. neighboring states' homicide rates both pre and post-RTC law. The result (shown below) indicates that that Florida's homicide rate did not rise compared to neighboring states. In fact, it actually dropped lower than all of them during the 1990s. 




Clayton Cramer and Dave Kopel have a very nice law review article written in 1995 where they go over the before and after data and reactions to Florida's RTC law. Here are some of the key points:

"A total of 350 licenses have been revoked. The revocations were for: clemency rule change or legislative change (66); illegiable prints (10); crime prior to licensure (74, of which 4 involved a firearm); crime after licensure (182, of which 17 involved a firearm); and "other" (18). Thus, of the 188,106 licensees, approximately 1 in 10,000 (1/100th of 1%) had a license revoked for a crime involving a firearm."

"Representative Ron Silver, the leading opponent of Florida's carry reform, graciously admitted in November 1990, 'There are lots of people, including myself, who thought things would be a lot worse as far as that particular situation [carry reform] is concerned. I'm happy to say they're not.' John Fuller, general counsel for the Florida Sheriffs Association, stated, 'I haven't seen where we have had any instance of persons with permits causing violent crimes, and I'm constantly on the lookout.'"

Drs. Tomislav Kovandzic and Thomas Marvell also did a study examining the relationship between the number of CCW permit holders and crime rates in 58 counties in Florida from 1980-2000. This study, which is superior to the McDowell et al. study, which only looked at 3 counties, concludes 

"...we find little evidence that increases in the number of citizens with concealed-handgun permits reduce or increase rates of violent crime."

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