ASSESSING THE IMPACT OF THE CONCEALED HANDGUN PERMITS

ON VIOLENT CRIMES

Introduction
In the United States, there are increasing debates regarding the effectiveness and relevance in allowing
law-abiding citizens to carry their own weapons in public (shall-carry law) as a means to reduce personal
harm that might be happening from the conducts of violent crimes. Advocates supporting the law-
abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns often supported their arguments by pointing out survey
results as pointed out in (Lott, 1996), that Americans had substantially high rate of personal defence
case; with approximately more than 750,000 cases up to 3,6 million cases per year. The vast majority of
these cases involve citizens brandishing guns to prevent attack. It is generally viewed that the victims,
especially women and the elderly, are much weaker than the violent criminal and therefore, guns are
regarded as a great equaliser, which would be able to provide citizens with greater ability to defend
themselves.

Potential defensive nature of guns can also be supported from the different rates of hot burglaries
(crimes that happen when citizens are at home). As reported by Lott (1996), nearly half of burglaries in
the UK (which enforces harsher gun control laws) are categorised under “hot burglary”. In contrary the
lax restrictions of gun ownership in the US has very small hot burglary rate of 13%. Furthermore, Lott
(1996) also reported a survey result where the convicted felons in the US reveal that they are more
concerned on the prospects of having encounter with armed victims than running into police.

Additionally, felons also frequently reported that they will avoid late-night burglaries in the US, that
would increase their potentials of “getting shot” by their armed victims. Additionally, usage of concealed
handguns by law-abiding citizens would be able to generate positive externality for others. Due to the
nature of these guns to be concealed, criminals would be unable to tell whether their potential victim is
armed before they strike. This is believed to raise the expected costs of the criminals to commit various
types of crimes.

However, at the same time, there had been various arguments developed to oppose the application of
concealed handgun laws. The argument is relatively straightforward, but extremely relevant; that in case
that guns are introduced during the case of violent encounters, there will be increasing probability of
mortal casualty (Ayres and Donohue, 2002). Furthermore, as argued by Lott and Mustard (1997),
murders can still happen from “unintentional fits of rage” which can happen to anyone, regardless of
their past criminal history. Additionally, more guns in the public could also increase the rate of
accidental deaths, and despite of it being brandished by citizens without criminal record history, the
ownership of guns could possibly generate motivations to conduct first-time crimes, or for other harmful
purposes beyond burglaries; such as revenge or vendetta. Therefore, simply keeping guns out of
people’s reach had been suggested to prevent deaths.

Motivated by the different perspectives communicated above, the author intended to perform empirical
investigations and critical assessment towards the arguments that allowing citizens without criminal
records to carry concealed handguns could reduce violent crimes and could possibly produce extremely
small and statistically insignificant change in the rate of accidental deaths.
Data and Methodology Description
The empirical investigation in this study would be based on the data from Stanford University and the
method would be based on study replications from previous findings by Donohue and Ayres (2003). The
data contains observation on crime, robbery and murder rates and various control variables for the 50
US states with the inclusions of the District of Columbia 1.

First of all, to test on the premise as of whether the adoption of shall-carry law would be able to deter
the amount of violent crime rate in the sample states, this study performs regression analysis; aiming to
capture the control factors that affects the rate of violent crimes and appraising the overall position of
the application of shall-carry law amongst the predictor variables. The overall effect of the shall-carry
law would also be compared against the other independent variable’s overall impacts.
The regression model that is adopted for this purpose is described as follows:

VIO = α + β1SHALL + β2INCARC_RATE + β3DENSITY+ β4AVGINC, where:

VIO = Violent crime rate (per 100,000 members of population).

SHALL = Control variable denoting the adoption of shall-carry law in the jurisdiction, with the
following coding:
1 = the state has a carry-law in effect
0 = otherwise
INCARC_RATE = Incarceration rate in the state in the previous year
DENSITY = Population per square mile of land area
AVGINC = Real per capita personal income in the state

Secondly, to test on the premise as of whether the adoption of shall-carry law would produce
“extremely small and statistically insignificant” change in the rate of accidental deaths, this study applies
the t-test procedures, aiming to measure the average mean of the murder rate between states that
adopts carry law effectively, against those that did not apply such rule. Murder rate is selected as this
variable also implies the case of deaths caused by the guns, either accidental and intentional. Both
regression and t-test analyses are performed using STATA statistical software.

Empirical Findings
a. Impact of Shall-carry law on Violent Crime Rate
The following figure summarises the regression results that appraise the impact of shall-carry law
towards violent crime rate:

Figure 1 – STATA Regression Test Results

1
Using the “guns96.dta” dataset
As seen from the results above, the regression results that explains the factors which causes the violent
rate crimes are described as follows:

VIO = -177.46 – 48.52SHALL + 1.25INCARC_RATE + 16.01DENSITY+ 20.50AVGINC

The regression model above suggests that there is a negative relationship (-48.52) between the
adoptions of shall carry law against the rate of violent crime, indicating that the increasing proportion of
this law’s adoption shall reduce the amount of violent crime rate in the sample states. This also
represents the only negative relationship in the regression model; as the regression report presented
above also indicates that there is a positive impact (1.25) of incarceration rate towards the rate of
crimes (higher rate of incarceration would increase the rate of violent crimes). Other demographic
indicators such as the density and average income also share positive relationships (16.01 and 20.5,
respectively), indicating that more densely populated regions, or those with higher rate of average
income tended to possess higher rate of violent crimes.

However, amongst these observed factors, only incarceration rate that is shown to possess statistically
significant impact against the rate of violent crime (sig. 0.000), whereas other factors’ significance level
are positioned greater than 0.05. In particular, the adoptions of shall carry law possess significance rate
of 0.400 towards the rate of violent crime; indicating that despite of their negative relationships
described above, it is unfeasible to select the adoptions of shall carry law as a factor that affects the
violent crime rate. Instead, the statistically insignificant impact might also indicate that the negative
relationship is merely established coincidentally, instead of being backed by causal-effect relationships
(Hair, 2010`); thus suggesting that although the shall-carry law has negative relationships against the
violent crime rates, its adoption cannot be used as a causal factor that deters violent crimes.

b. Shall-carry law and the rate of murder

To attest the change of the rate of deaths during the adoption of shall-carry law, two sample t-test is
conducted to compare the rate of murder between states which adopts shall carry law against their
counterparts that do not. The results are presented as follows:

Figure 2 – STATA Murder Rate Comparison

As seen from the results above, there are actually greater amount of average murder rate in states
which does not adopt shall carry law (8.85); in comparison against states which permits the citizens to
carry concealed handguns (6.30). The results also reported a relatively large difference of 2.54 between
both cases. This indicates that the states which permit the citizens to carry concealed handguns will
have lesser rate of death. However, it is also imperative to notice that the statistical significance of the
difference is statistically insignificant (Sig. 0.368 > Sig. 0.000). This suggests that despite of the reduction
of murder rate in states permitting the citizens to carry concealed handguns, such changes are also,
merely coincidental and do not represents a real-time impact on the state’s decision in adopting shall-
carry law into their premises.

Conclusions and Recommendations

Inferring to the results of the statistical analyses reported above, the author concluded that although
the policy to allow the citizens without criminal records and mental illness history to carry concealed
handguns has the capacities to deter violent crimes, such capacities is not backed by statistically
significant explanatory capacities; that such relationship is merely coincidental at best. Thus it is not
feasible to attest that the application shall-carry law would cause the deterioration of the rate of violent
crimes. On its overall impact towards the change in accidental deaths, the author concludes that
although statistically insignificant impact was observed for the capacities of the shall carry law in
affecting the rate of accidental death, the change is not extremely small, but relatively large instead.

Based on these findings, the author would therefore suggests that the adoption of shall carry law cannot
be considered as a solution that would reduce the number of violent deaths in the states that adopts it.
At the same time, the adoption of this policy would not impose any substantial changes regarding the
rate of accidental deaths, thus the findings of this study also challenges the proponents which suggests
that the adoption of shall-carry law would increase the propensities of accidental deaths in the
perimeter. The lack of statistically significant relationships in both cases also indicates that the adoption
of shall-carry law would not impose any effect towards the neighbourhood and the states, both from the
standpoint in crime reduction, as well as the fluctuation of the accidental death rates in the observed
states.
Instead of focusing towards the cases and issues regarding the shall-carry law’s adoption, the author
believes that local authorities should be focused on more important issue that determines the rate of
violent deaths, where the findings from the regression model above indicate that the violence rate in
the neighbourhood is actually related to the incarceration rate, and the management of citizens’
incarceration policy might actually have direct, explanatory impact towards the rate of violent crimes.

At the same time, this study also recognises the potential limitations on the data, especially to the fact
that this study adopts the rate of murder to explain accidental deaths. Considering that murder variable
also consider intentional killing, then this variable might perhaps introduce category biases. It is
recommended therefore, for future studies to perform data sorting which solely focus on the rate of
accidental deaths within the murder estimation in the study.

List of References:
Ayres, I. and Donohue III, J.J., 2002. Shooting down the more guns, less crime hypothesis (No. w9336).
National Bureau of Economic Research.

Hair, J.F., 2010. Multivariate data analysis. Pearson College Division.

Lott, Jr, J.R. and Mustard, D.B., 1997. Crime, deterrence, and right‐to‐carry concealed handguns. The
Journal of Legal Studies, 26(1), pp.1-68.

Lott Jr, J.R., 1996. Does allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns save lives. Val. UL
Rev., 31, p.355.