God & Gun from p7 permit if they satisfy a basic application pro- cess. California, New York, and a handful of other states have long imposed a stricter, “may-issue” regulatory setup in which a per- son must provide justification for carrying a firearm. Many “may-issue” jurisdictions re- quire applicants to attest that they’re in danger and needed a firearm to protect themselves. GVPedia’s recent effort was aimed at re- butting a January report in which coauthors John Lott and Carl Moody suggested that vio- lent crime and gun homicide rates in 13 states had remained flat over the five years after those states implemented constitutional carry. (GVPedia described Lott and Moody’s work as “riddled with errors and miscoded variables that render their entire analysis un- usable.” Lott claimed GVPedia’s research failed to account for shifts in income levels and unemployment as well as other demographic variables that could influence crime rates.) Among the researchers GVPedia enlisted to critique Lott’s research on permitless carry was John Donohue, an endowed professor at Stan- ford Law School. In “More Guns, More Unin- tended Consequences,” a working paper released in late June, Donohue and others con- clude that violent crime involving firearms sharply increased in cities that implemented right-to-carry gun laws, a broad category of regulations that includes “shall-issue” regimes. Examining crime rates in 47 major U.S. cit- ies from 1979 through 2019, Donohue’s study found that right-to-carry laws led to in- creases in gun-related violent crime and gun- related robbery by as much as 30 percent. “ TO TAKE THE SAFEGUARDS OF THE PERMITTING PROCESS AWAY IS ASKING FOR TROUBLE.” The study notes that surges in gun theft fol- lowing adoption of right-to-carry laws put thousands of guns “into the hands of criminals or illegal gun market,” contributing to the spike in crime. Other factors included a decreased rate at which police officers solve or clear crimes following the implementation of right- to-carry laws. “Burdens on police time caused by greater gun carrying, police hesitation to en- gage with a more heavily armed civilian popu- lation, or weakened police-community relations” could be at play after right-to-carry laws are passed, according to the study. Donohue asserts that the newest research in the field incorporates advanced statistical methods and has shown definitively that loos- ening public gun-carrying restrictions has led to an increase in violent crime across the nation. Donohue has been a staunch critic of Lott 8 since the late 1990s, when the latter released a controversial paper, “Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns,” sparking a national debate on gun policy by Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images concluding that crime is strongly deterred when more law-abiding citizens carry guns. Lott and Moody acknowledged in a May 2021 report that new research over the past decade seems to indicate that loosening gun- carrying laws results in an increase in violent crime. But they maintain that the net effect of looser gun-carry laws is crime deterrence. M A “Calculated Effort” to Stifle Research eanwhile, the RAND Corporation, a government-funded think tank, eval- uated earlier studies by Lott, Moody, Donohue, and dozens of other researchers and, in April 2020, concluded that “shall-issue concealed-carry laws may increase violent crime,” but that the evidence was “limited.” Charles Manski, an expert in statistical analysis at Northwestern University, once of- fered an explanation for why gun policy re- search can come up with divergent findings despite analyzing similar (and sometimes nearly identical) data sets. “Data cannot reveal counterfactual out- comes. That is, data cannot reveal what the crime rate in a [right-to-carry] state would have been if the state had not enacted the law,” Manski wrote in a 2015 working paper. “To estimate the law’s effect, one must some- how ‘fill in’ the missing counterfactual obser- vations. This requires making assumptions that cannot be tested empirically.” In Manski’s view, gun policy researchers need to better acknowledge the limits of their statistical models and recognize that loosen- ing gun permit restrictions may have varying impacts from state to state and from one crime category to another. A governmental disinclination to consult or underwrite in-depth research has made it all the more difficult for the public to find conclusive data on gun policy. “The gun lobby tried to follow the model of the tobacco industry directly by trying to get Congress to stop funding research into the gun area,” Donohue says. “There’s been a calcu- lated effort, very much in the same way the to- bacco industry engaged, to either subvert the truth by trying to raise questions about studies or by trying to stop funding of research.” The authors of a peer-reviewed study published three years ago in the Journal of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has vowed to pass “constitutional carry” in Florida. General Internal Medicine examined a wide range of gun-control laws and their effect on crime rates and found that implementing state-level “shall-issue” laws was associated with a 9 percent increase in homicide rates. Further loosening of regulations by implementing permitless carry did not significantly increase homicide rates, the authors found. T The Bigger Picture he debate over whether to adopt con- stitutional carry in Florida is taking place against a broader backdrop of major changes in federal gun regulations. On June 23, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state restrictions in New York infringed on citizens’ rights under the Second and Four- teenth amendments. That landmark decision is likely to compel other states with “may-issue” permit laws to retool their statutes to comply with the new precedent, though Florida, al- ready a “shall-issue” state, won’t be affected. Two days after the Supreme Court ruling, President Biden signed a bill that some media outlets have described as the most significant federal gun law reform since 1994. The Bipar- tisan Safer Communities Act of 2022 expands a ban on gun purchases by domestic abusers, changes the background-check process on gun purchasers aged 18 to 21 to include juve- nile records, and provides federal funding for so-called red flag laws that establish a special court process to block dangerous individuals from possessing firearms. Still, Prevent Gun Violence Florida’s Patri- cia Brigham says she fully expects DeSantis to get his way during the next legislative ses- sion, and that the Florida legislature will pass a law removing permit requirements for car- rying guns in public in the Sunshine State. “Unfortunately, the political landscape is much more hostile now to any sort of pre- venting of bad gun bills going through be- cause we have a different type of Republican Party than we once did,” says Brigham, who served as president of the League of Women Voters of Florida from 2018 to 2021. 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