Law Commons^™

The Impact Of Right-To-Carry Laws And The Nrc Report: Lessons For The Empirical Evaluation Of Law And Policy, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

For over a decade, there has been a spirited academic debate over the impact on crime of laws that grant citizens the presumptive right to carry concealed handguns in public— so-called right-to-carry (RTC) laws. In 2005, the National Research Council (NRC) offered a critical evaluation of the ‘‘more guns, less crime’’ hypothesis using county-level crime data for the period 1977–2000. Seventeen of the eighteen NRC panel members essentially concluded that the existing research was inadequate to conclude that RTC laws increased or decreased crime. The final member of the panel, though, concluded that the NRC_s panel data regressions supported the …