The Impact of Constitutional Carry Legislation Among Urban Settings

• In Event: Poster Session 2

Abstract

The relative novelty of constitutional carry laws has provided few opportunities to systematically assess their effects on crime and public and police safety. As a result, concerns regarding the impact of relaxed gun legislation on public safety and the safety of police officers are met primarily with speculation. To help fill the void in the extant literature, we partnered with three large and urban municipal police departments in recent constitutional carry adopting states to examine whether changes in weapons carrying laws influence criminal conduct, especially criminal behavior linked to weapons. We employ a standard single-group interrupted time series design that compares post-intervention (the passing of conceal carry legislation in each state) across targeted crime and arrest outcomes to pre-intervention trends within each city. We find no evidence that constitutional carry legislation corresponded with changes in serious violent crime. Yet, evidence of increases in certain types of arrests where suspects were charged with a firearm-related offense did emerge. This study is one of the first to provide evidence that reckless firearm endangerment may in fact increase with such legislation. We encourage future research to explore this in greater detail to assess its validity across various contexts.

Authors

• Ryan Motz, University of Cincinnati

• Nicholas Corsaro, University of Cincinnati