Right-to-carry Concealed Weapon Laws and Homicide in Large U.s. Counties: the Effect on Weapon Types, Victim Characteristics, and Victim-offender Relationships*

Recently, a number of states have enacted laws that allow citizens to carry concealed weapons. This “natural experiment” was analyzed by John Lott and David Mustard, who found that these right-to-carry laws reduced violent crime, with a substitution toward property crimes, in those jurisdictions that adopted this law. Of particular importance, they found that homicide was reduced significantly, with even greater declines in larger jurisdictions. Their findings came at the same time that major reductions in homicide were occurring in many cities and states that did not change their gun-carrying policies, which lead to questions of whether their finding was spurious, caused by problems with the data or methods. In this paper, we describe an analysis that looks at the effect of changing one aspect of their homicide analysis: disaggregating homicide data by weapon type, victim characteristics, and victimoffender relationships. The results show that the liberalized carrying laws are associated with a number of effects, some that are consistent with those found by Lott and Mustard and others that are not. It also illustrates the importance of being able to look beyond aggregate crime measures in this type of examination, which is currently possible on a national level only for the crime of homicide.