I caught this post on X (formerly Twitter).
Dr. Daniel Semenza, according to his website:
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice at Rutgers University – Camden as well as the Director of Interpersonal Violence Research with the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center. I have a secondary appointment as Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban-Global Health in the School of Public Health at Rutgers University. Finally, I am a faculty researcher with the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at the Rockefeller Institute of Government at SUNY.
I earned my PhD in the Department of Sociology at Emory University in 2018, specializing in criminology and the sociology of health and illness under the direction of Dr. Robert Agnew. I aim to adopt a multidisciplinary approach to my research and teaching whenever possible across criminology, sociology, public health, and public policy.
Broadly speaking, my research examines (1) the causes and consequences of community gun violence and (2) the connections between health, criminal justice exposure, and violent victimization. The study of health disparities is a central focus across both areas of research. I have published my work in a range of outlets including Social Science & Medicine, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Justice Quarterly, Journal of Criminal Justice, Preventive Medicine, Homicide Studies, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, and Health & Place. I am currently an editorial board member for Journal of Criminal Justice, Homicide Studies, and Journal of Marriage & Family,.
My hackles suggest that he is not an impartial academic, but an anti-gun activist with an agenda, and that his research will be shoddy and biased.
I was not disappointed.
His article is available on Research Gate.
The Relationship between Concealed Carry Licenses and Firearm Homicide in the US: A Reciprocal County‑Level Analysis
Abstract This study investigates the reciprocal county-level relationship between the number of concealed carry weapon (CCW) licenses issued and homicides between 2010 and 2019 in a sample of eleven states. We utilize a random intercept cross-lagged panel model (RI-CLPM) approach accounting for reciprocal effects over time between homicide and concealed carry licenses, providing a robust methodological approach to the study of concealed carry and homicide. The results of the RI-CLPM found that increases in the number of CCWs in 2010–2017 were statistically associated with increases in total gun homicide in 2011–2018. Reciprocally, we found some limited evidence that increases in gun homicide were associated with changes in the number of CCWs issued in subsequent years during the early part of our study period. Far from concealed carry making people safer, our model finds acute safety risks associated with expansion of legal firearm carrying. As the right to carry firearms expands in many states, we emphasize the importance of responsible gun ownership practices, and draw attention to the need to implement preventive laws that keep guns out of the hands of people with prior violent histories and from places where violence risk is amplified.
Note two things in this excerpt: The results of the RI-CLPM found that increases in the number of CCWs in 2010–2017 were statistically associated with increases in total gun homicide in 2011–2018. Reciprocally, we found some limited evidence that increases in gun homicide were associated with changes in the number of CCWs issued in subsequent years during the early part of our study period.
First, the choice of the phrase total gun homicide. Homicide is the killing of one person by another. It can be legal or illegal, however, the implication is that homicide is a criminal act. Total gun homicides could, and probably do, include legal defensive shoots. When a criminal is killed by a CCW, that is a gun homicide. It’s a legal gun homicide, but it will count toward the total.
This is a form of academic dishonesty. Of course, an increase in legal concealed carry will increase the number of criminals who are killed. The question is, does the increase in legal concealed carry increase the number of criminal homicides? To conflate good shootings and murders for the purpose of making concealed carry look like a danger is mendacious and dishonest.
Second, the very order of that statement seems like it puts the cart before the horse, i.e., increasing concealed carry increases the number of homicides (implied criminal homicides), but the number of homicides only marginally increases the number of concealed carriers.
What we’ve seen is that concealed carry goes up as violent crime rates go up, as people react to rising crime by wanting to be able to defend themselves.
Let’s look at the text of the article, itself:
Many researchers argue laws that enable more people to carry guns in public will increase shootings [1–4] and crimes committed with a firearm [5, 6]. In opposition, others claim concealed carry laws enable citizens to defend themselves or other citizens against potential attacks [7–9]. Despite substantial scholarly attention to the issue of how concealed carry influences firearm violence, there are several limitations to past research. First, most studies that examine how concealed carry impacts rates of firearm violence rely on measurements that codify the presence of particular state policies related to concealed carry [2–6] or self-report surveys of carrying behaviors [10]. Although these studies are informative, there is a need for research that leverages objective data about both concealed carrying behaviors (e.g., permit applications, licenses issued) and firearm violence (e.g., standardized homicide data). For example, different state provisions in their permitting policy may alter the specific number of licenses issued, such that no two shall-issue states, or may-issue states, may be alike [5]. Second, few studies have incorporated longitudinal data to analyze the reciprocal relationship between concealed carry and rates of firearm violence. Firearm violence may influence the number of concealed carry licenses if people are concerned about high crime rates and want to protect themselves. We leverage a series of longitudinal, reciprocal models to assess the association between concealed carry permitting and total firearm homicide rates.
Note the bolded text. This is undoubtedly true. When the news is full of stories about violence and murder, people want to be able to carry concealed.
The next question is, does this increase in a statistically significant way, the overall number of homicides?
In essence, are concealed carriers contributing to the homicide rate? Keep this thought in mind.
This Study
The review of the literature described above reveals ample theoretical and empirical reason to expect that recent expansions in right-to-carry laws may have profound implications for public safety. We seek to assess the impact of change in the number of licenses issued (as a different proxy for expanded public fire-arm carrying [9]) on firearm homicide, while simultaneously accounting for potential reciprocity between homicide and local firearm carrying. Additionally, we control for other potential indicators of gun availability, including the number of gun stores in local areas and the percentage of suicides commited with a firearm, in addition to commonly used macro-level correlates of homicide [19, 20]. Most of the research described herein focused on state-level laws related to conceal carry rather than the actual number of licenses issued at the local level. This involves using a treatment variable, where a 0 indicates times and places where concealed carrying is prohibited (or a may-issue law is in place) and a 1 is used for the times and places where a shall-issue law goes into effect [3, 5, 7]. A limited number of studies have alternatively assessed the impact of concealed carry permitting on crime using a measure of the number of licenses issued. Using a county-level analysis for four states, namely Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Texas, Phillips and colleagues found no relationship between lagged licensing rates and crime rates [21]. In another study of Florida counties, Carter and Binder examined the association between firearm violence and concealed gun applications and permits [22]. In their diagnostic testing, they found that concealed carry applications in the previous year had no effect on armed violent crime. Notably, however, these studies are limited in time frame and geographic coverage. We utilize a unique longitudinal dataset with annual counts of the licenses issued for each county in a sample of eleven states. The issue of reciprocal relationships was one of the major methodological problems highlighted by the National Research Council in its review of studies examining the effects of gun laws and firearm availability on firearm violence [23]. The potential for changes in violent crime to be reciprocally related to the passing of shall-issue laws and license applications has been discussed in many of the studies mentioned above [24]. Scholars have suggested that protective gun ownership and carrying may be driven by a fear of crime in a person’s community [22]. Recent Pew Research data suggest that protection tops the reasons for people owning a gun in the US, where over two-thirds cite protection as the primary reason [25]. Failure to account for reciprocal causation could result in inconsistent and biased estimates of firearm licensing or legislation on crime [23, 26]. While some studies have attempted to address these concerns in studies of licensing and violent crime [27, 28], they have largely documented effects from a policy change in a single state or over short periods of time, whereas many other state or local factors may explain crime changes in states with a concealed carry law change. We hope to overcome some methodological concerns of prior studies on this topic by using a cross-lagged panel modeling approach that accounts for the reciprocal effects over time between firearm homicide and the number of concealed carry licenses issued over a 10-year time period. We specifically test the following two hypotheses:
H1. Increased change in the number of concealed carry licenses issued will be associated with increased changes in firearm homicide.H2. Increased change in the number of firearm homicides will be associated with increases in the number of concealed carry licenses issued.
If I understand the bolded text correctly, they didn’t look at the effect of concealed carry on crime in a local way, but in a global way across eleven states. Ergo, if crime increased in one locale, people may have gone out and gotten permits in other locales. This I don’t disagree with. If you see stories of crime in the big city, but you live in the suburbs or in the country, you might get a permit for those few times that you have to travel into the city. However, the idea that people in the suburbs or country getting concealed carry permits drives up gun violence in the city is ludicrous.
Data and Methods
Data for our dependent variable, the count of firearm homicides per county year, come from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Multiple Cause of Death data. These county-level mortality data are based on death certificates for US residents and provided to the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). We defined gun homicide using ICD-10 codes X93 (assault by handgun discharge), X94 (assault by rifle, shotgun, and larger firearm discharge), and X95 (assault by other and unspecified firearm dis-charges). All deaths caused by a homicide with a fire-arm were counted per the county year of the victim’s place of death. These data were advantageous given that the NCHS combines detailed information from death certificate data with information from autopsy reports and police records, providing a more complete picture of the incident, including distinguishing between firearm and non-firearm homicides. These data are also advantageous because they are more complete and more accurate than other official data sources, such as the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) or NIBRS, concerns about which have been extensively documented [29]. The current study only utilizes data from the eleven states for which the numbers of concealed carry licenses issued were also available for all counties during the time period of our study, 2010–2019 (Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Utah). States including Iowa, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Utah have since passed laws allowing residents to carry concealed weapons without a permit, although these laws were not in effect during the time period of this study. As such, changes in licensing between 2010 and 2019 should reflect changes in the ability of people to publicly carry in these states. Kansas did allow permitless carry beginning in 2015. Observations for Kansas counties after 2015 were excluded as a result. These eleven states combine for 832 counties available for analysis. Table 1 reveals that the average number of firearm homicides per county in our sample ranged from 2.27 per year in 2010 to 3.53 in 2019. Homicide is a rare outcome to study at the county level per year, especially for smaller, more rural counties. In part, this is why many prior studies of firearm availability and homicide either conduct research at the state level or pool county homicides over several years. We discuss this further in the analytical strategy, below.
Note the bold. This goes to what I said earlier about counting both good defensive shoots and murders as homicides.
Results
Figure 1 illustrates the RI-CLPM examining the reciprocal effects of firearm homicide on the number of CCWs issued with limited control variables. The estimates presented in Fig. 1 represent the unstandardized regression coefficients (single-headed arrows) and the unstandardized residual covariances (double-headed arrows). Focusing on the between-construct regression coefficients, increases in the number of CCWs issued in 2010–2015 and 2017 were statistically associated with increases in firearm homicide in 2011–2016 and 2018, respectively. Specifically, a one thousand license increase in the number of CCWs issued was associated with between a .266 and a 1.898 increase in total firearm homicide. Alternatively, increases in firearm homicide in 2010 and 2018 were associated with increases in the number of CCWs issued in 2011 and 2019, but increases in firearm homicide in 2012, 2015, 2016, and 2017 were associated with decreases in the number of CCWs issued in 2013, 2016, 2017, and 2018. Figure 2 provides the RI-CLPM examining the reciprocal effects of total gun homicide on the number of CCWs issued with all of the control variables. The results of the second RI-CLPM support the find-ings of the first RI-CLPM. In particular, increases in the number of CCWs in 2010–2017 were statistically associated with increases in firearm homicide in 2011–2018. The estimates suggest that a one thousand license increase in the number of CCWs issued was associated with between a .385 and 2.128 increase in total firearm homicide. Regarding the reciprocal pathway, it appeared that increases in firearm homicide in 2010, 2011, and 2013 were associated with increases in the number of CCWs issued in 2011, 2012, and 2014. Taken together, the models suggest that the number of CCWs issued the previous year was associated with increases in total firearm homicide the subsequent year. On the other hand, firearm homicide the previous year had limited little impact on the number of CCWs the subsequent year.
Here is where this falls apart. I absolutely believe they conflated correlation with causality. As crime rates increase, people got permits. Year over year as crime went up, people got permits. Crime continued to go up, people got more permits. There is no evidence that the people who obtained the permits were the ones who went out and committed that many homicides to drive up the numbers the following year.
Now we get political.
Discussion
With nuanced evidence of an association between CCW licenses and homicide, it is imperative that discourse on the topic of gun violence avoids simplified notions such as “good guy with a gun” or “bad guy with a gun.” Such depictions obscure the everyday interactions and disputes between ordinary people that can boil over into violence and the lethal potential of access to a firearm in such a context. Instead of considering good guys and bad guys with guns, it is far more productive to focus on a broader harm reduction framework that does not rely on an oppositional “us versus them” framework. More guns in public can create significant harm in everyday interactions, whether through accidental shootings, road rage incidents, or domestic incidents between people that are estranged. And a move towards shall-issue and permitless carry policies may increase the likelihood of prohibited buyers and persons with prior violent history obtaining guns [35]. The adoption of shall-issue laws is particularly risky for future violence when states allowed people with prior misdemeanor violent convictions to obtain a CCW [5]. These findings together speak to the instrumentality effect of fire-arms, with mounting evidence that increases in guns contribute to fatalities that would otherwise have been non-fatal assaults [16]. Therefore, the first major policy implication is to ensure guns do not end up in the wrong hands. In response to the Bruen decision, some States including New Jersey submitted legislation to strengthen background checks and ensuring permits could only be obtained after extensive review and gun safety training. This is not a policy to limit the right to gun ownership, but part of a broad standard that gun owners and non-owners alike support [36]. Data suggest that an increasing majority of gun owners and people identifying as either Democrat or Republican support universal background checks, stronger regulations of gun dealers, and requiring tests of safe handling practices prior to carrying a concealed weapon [36]. This public sentiment is echoed in recent iterations of the National Survey of Gun Policy [37], revealing high support among gun owners for conceal carry applicants to demonstrate competence in safe and lawful gun use. While public support exists, however, ordinary citizens may need to be more activated to discuss these policies with their elected representatives.
They present no evidence of what is in the bold. They present no evidence that it is the people with carry permits driving the increase in homicide. They simply note that there is an increase in homicide and an increase in issued permits, but nothing to show that the increase in permits caused the increase in homicide. Everything in bold is speculation and anti-gun talking points.
In addition to strengthening standards at the point of purchase and demonstrating responsible gun ownership, concealed carry also needs some guard rails control-ling the carrying of handguns in public places, such as schools, alcohol serving outlets, sports arenas, and other highly populated public spaces. The National Survey on Gun Policy in 2019 and 2021 also revealed broad declining support for expanding the locations for civilian gun carrying [37]. Yet recent reports have detailed upticks in the number of guns carried into airports in the US [38]. And several recent studies reveal double digit increases in homicide as a result of weakening carry laws and expanding carrying in public [1, 3–5], including a 29% increase in firearm workplace homicides [4]. Thus, restricting customer and employee firearm access in the workplace and allowing private business and public buildings to enforce these restrictions may help to reduce lethal escalation. Colleges and universities have had some success in prohibiting legal gun owners from carrying weapons on to campus. But policies allowing gun carrying on campus have increased the risk of assault, self-harm, and lethality [39].
Finally, we are mindful of the generalizability of our findings. Concealed carry licenses are not required in permitless carry states, making it more difficult to ascertain numbers of people carrying firearms in public in those states. But by using data on licenses prior to the rapid expansion in permitless carry policies, we highlight the need for research to consider the role that increased numbers of guns in public can play in creating additional harm. It is clear that study of the dynamics between legal firearm availability, right to carry legislation, and the extent of gun violence is far from over. Instead, researchers moving forward must consider how increases in carrying of firearms can impact certain types of gun violence, for certain groups, and in certain contexts. These inquiries will likely lead to more consistent conclusions around the harm generated by increases in firearms in public.
This is activism, not academia.
Again, the most salient aspect of this study is the total lack of evidence that it is concealed carriers who are causing the increase in homicide.
In many states, the large urban cities have turned to shit due to a number of progressive soft-on-crime policies.
Violence has been increasing in nearly every major metropolitan area since the Ferguson riots in 2014, then again after the George Floyd riots in 2020.
Consequently, more and more people have gotten concealed carry permits as they have watched large civil disruptions, murder, and crime happen with inadequate police response.
This study implies that it is concealed carry that is driving the homicide increase, not other factors, and concealed carry increases is a response to that. This study uses vague anti-gun talking points about concealed carriers shooting people over road rage incidents but cites no examples of it, let alone enough to make a statistically significant impact.
This study is an academically dishonest attempt to use data to push an anti-gun agenda. It’s the sort of farce that could only come out of Leftist academia.
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