New Research: Estimating the Effect of Concealed Carry Laws on Murder: A Response to Bondy, et al.
Professor Carl Moody, our CPRC research director, and Dr. John Lott have new research available for download.
Abstract
In response to our short paper in Academia Letters, Bondy et. al. published much longer response in this journal. We show that the Bondy et. al. criticisms are misleading and irrelevant. We present new estimates of the effect of right-to-carry and permit-less “constitutional carry” laws on the murder rate. We find that the traditional two-way fixed-effects analysis shows that right-to-carry laws have a negative but only marginally significant effect and that constitutional carry laws have an insignificantly negative effect. We also apply new difference-in-differences analyses to the same data and find that both laws have a negative but insignificant effect on murder. We conclude that, although the standard errors indicate that these coefficients are not precisely estimated, it cannot be claimed that either one of these laws significantly increases murder.
