If we have learned anything about guns over the past 650 or so years is that firearms don’t kill people, firearms that go off and the (usually metal) projectile that comes out of those firearms hits other people, killing them. Stanford Law Professor John Donohue analyzed decades of crime data and came to the conclusion that violent crime in Right to Carry (RTC) states was “13 to 15 percent higher — over a period of 10 years — than it would have been had the state not adopted the law.”
Donohue’s paper builds on the National Academies’ National Research Council’s 2004 report investigating guns and violence. While that report debunked claims that RTC laws had been shown to reduce crime, the 16 experts on the panel were not able to definitively conclude that carrying concealed weapons had an effect – positive or negative – on violent crime. Their uncertainty was rooted in the fragility of estimates that were derived from differing statistical models applied to panel data available at the time.
However, where the 2004 report could not “definitively conclude” the connection between RTC laws and violent crimes, Donohue employed a new approach that he believes adds more confidence to the trends in his findings.
The most convincing comparison would take two otherwise identical states and observe violent crime when one of them adopts a RTC law. Donohue and his team employed a new statistical technique that creates a “synthetic control,” which attempts to find the best possible comparison for the RTC-adopting state drawn from among other states that had no RTC law at the time.
The synthetic control approach, a research method now widely applied in economics and political science, uses an algorithm that combines crime patterns from several non-RTC states – or during the time before states adopted RTC – to create an artificial or synthetic state.
The important thing to remember here is that the moment this study is posted and shared, someone will say something about “suicides” and then say there’s nothing we can do. But, anyone with a reasonable amount of thought can see that we should probably try to do something. And studies like these lend themselves to imagining a world where even common sense gun safety legislation might have a real impact.