In 2022, Cam wrote a piece about how a Bloomberg columnist exposed the shady world of garbage anti-gun research. Yes, I’m framing it that way, because, while Cam was more polite about it than I’m going to be, I don’t see how else to frame it.
At that time, Cam wrote:
One example that Brown raises is the oft-repeated claim that “gun homicides” dropped by 40% after the state of Connecticut adopted a permit-to-purchase law requiring handgun owners to first receive a gun permit from their local police department. This was breathlessly reported back in 2015 by outlets like the Washington Post and repeated on Democratic debate stages in 2020, but Brown revealed some interesting parts of the study that weren’t widely reported and utterly discount that 40% statistic.
First, the drop in homicides in Connecticut wasn’t based on a comparison between previous years, or the United States as a whole. Instead, researchers crafted a “synthetic Connecticut” comprised of portions of Rhode Island, California, and several other states and compared those homicide totals to Connecticut’s post-permit murder rate. That’s bad enough, but what makes it egregiously worse is that the researcher’s own data showed that the “drop” in Connecticut’s murder rate was short-lived, and that within a few years the gun homicide rate in the real Connecticut was actually more than 40% higher than it was in the synthetic state dreamt up by the academics.
The original piece he was reporting on from Reason offered this:
This study is typical of the field: strong claims based on complex models and uncertain data. Worse, researchers often cherry pick outcome measures, time periods, and locations to get their preferred results.
Now, why am I bringing this up now?
Because a study from July just reached my eyes, and it seems rather…consistent with what was reported in 2022.
In the last decade, one of the most substantial changes to firearm policy is the widespread adoption of permitless concealed carry laws. Since 2015, more than 20 states have adopted a permitless carry law. Permitless carry laws allow firearm owners to carry a concealed handgun in public without first obtaining a license and undergoing a background check. This article estimates the causal impact of permitless carry laws on crime using stacked event study estimators. I find that violent crime increases by 7% in the 12 months following the law’s adoption, with increases beginning shortly after passage, or several months before the law formally takes effect. I find no evidence of offsetting deterrence in property crime. The rise in violence is driven by a 12% increase in aggravated assaults involving firearms. These effects are accompanied by a 22% decline in police enforcement of weapons law violations and modest increases in reports of stolen firearms.
Now, if you want to see the impact of permitless carry, wouldn’t you start looking at when the law went into effect versus before?
One would imagine. However, what we have here is a curious case of looking at the issue from before the law went into effect and counting that as the defining moment. That’s interesting.
Especially since it’s beyond ridiculous to count any act of violence from before the law went into effect as being because of the law. It just doesn’t work that way.
And then we have the other flip side.
Let’s also look at when states adopted constitutional carry, starting in 2015, when this guy started looking.
- 2016: Idaho, Mississippi, West Virginia
- 2017: Missouri, New Hampshire, North Dakota
- 2019: Kentucky, Oklahoma, South Dakota
- 2021: Arkansas, Iowa, Montana, Tennessee, Texas, Utah
- 2022: Georgia, Indiana, Ohio, Alabama (Note: Alabama passed in 2022/implemented Jan 2023).
- 2024: Louisiana, South Carolina
In other words, half of the states adopted constitutional carry during some of the most violent years of the last decade. It’s almost as if they might have done so in response to the violence or something.
Then we have the fact that, by the author’s own admission, there’s a three- to four-month window between passage of the laws and them going into effect, but he’s counting that as the same as the law applying, which makes no sense at all.
He compares it to the 12 months before the law was signed, which is also interesting, because there was a small increase in homicides in 2016 and 2017 — the same time as six of the 20 states with permitless carry laws adopted them — and then we have the increases of the COVID years, particularly 2021 and 2022, when 10 states adopted permitless carry.
In other words, the national trends, which extend well past these states, show an increase across the board for violent crime. It’s not the permitless carry.
But the overall point here isn’t so much that the study is BS, but why it’s garbage.
Everything about this smacks of an agenda, up to and including absolutely no explanation as to why, if more guns on the streets lead to more crime, we have seen a freefall in the violent crime rates since the Bruen decision. I’m intellectually honest enough to say that while I think the correlation is because of causation, I can’t definitively prove it.
What I can say, though, is that if the author of this — well, “study,” I guess you’d call it — is right, we should see causation lead to correlation, and that’s not happening.
Everything about it smacks of what that Bloomberg columnist actually said. The timeline is bizarre, there are convoluted methods, and it’s nothing more than a screed looking to attack a pro-gun law that makes anti-gunners wet themselves.
Here’s something he needs to understand, though. Even if he’s right, I don’t care.
My rights are my rights, including the right to bear arms. I’m not giving them up for anyone.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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