'Constitutional Carry', Crime Rates, and Gun Rights
2 July 2024
A law advertised as “constitutional carry”, backed by Jeff Landry and the Louisiana GOP, came into effect July 1st. This law explicitly legalizes the carrying of a concealed handgun, which had murky legal status before, and drops the age of those who are permitted to carry a concealed handgun from 21 to 18. Advocates have touted the law for its coherence with the second amendment as well as for far more dubious reasons of “public safety”. Both arguments are wrong.
Let’s start with public safety. The notion that firearms, and handguns in particular, deter violent criminals from acting violently is old enough and false enough to count as political folklore. It’s easy to imagine scenarios where we defend ourselves by brandishing or firing a gun, but such events seldom occur in the real world. In reality, if a criminal has their own gun drawn and pointed at you, attempting to draw your own weapon would be a potentially lethal mistake, and a handgun at that point is just another valuable object to be robbed from you.
Contrary to reality, it’s often claimed by advocates of concealed carry that the use of a firearm prevents over a million victimizations a year. A research team at Harvard’s School of Public Health has examined this claim, and found it to be in conflict with empirical evidence:
To believe fully the claims of millions of self-defense gun uses each year would mean believing that decent law-abiding citizens shot hundreds of thousands of criminals. But the data from emergency departments belie this claim, unless hundreds of thousands of wounded criminals are afraid to seek medical care. But virtually all criminals who have been shot went to the hospital, and can describe in detail what happened there.
The Harvard team also found that gun use in self-defense is exceedingly rare, and that the victims who perhaps need it most virtually never use guns in self-defense. The use of a gun also did not make it less likely for the victim to be injured versus taking other protective actions:
Victims use guns in less than 1% of contact crimes, and women never use guns to protect themselves against sexual assault (in more than 300 cases). Victims using a gun were no less likely to be injured after taking protective action than victims using other forms of protective action. Compared to other protective actions, the National Crime Victimization Surveys provide little evidence that self-defense gun use is uniquely beneficial in reducing the likelihood of injury or property loss.
Worse, the team found that gun use more often occurs in socially undesirable situations, such as in escalating a verbal argument or intimidating intimately related individuals, especially one’s spouse or children. In Shreveport, many homicides are preceded by verbal beef, such as the murder of Landry Anglin in 2022, an innocent bystander who was shot in a “rolling gun battle” that began over a feud in the local rap scene. Her murder was cynically exploited by Jeff Landry’s gubernatorial campaign despite the fact that laws he advocates, including “constitutional carry”, are likely to result in more innocent bystanders getting shot.
The Harvard team’s result is not unique, either. A RAND Corporation analysis found that available evidence supported the hypothesis that concealed-carry laws may increase total homicides, and found some, albeit limited, evidence for concealed carry laws increasing violent crime in general.
Likewise, researcher Stephen B. Billings found that gun ownership has a link to crime victimization: not only are people who have been victimized more likely to buy a gun to protect themselves, but they are more likely to be victimized again and have their gun stolen from them in turn. Billings found a vicious cycle of victimization leading to gun ownership, leading to theft, leading to victimization, as guns that are bought in response to victimization are then stolen, sold on the black market, and used to create new victims.
This is what makes it very odd that concealed carry is touted by conservatives as a mechanism for improving public safety. So-called “constitutional carry” is more likely to make Louisiana’s streets more dangerous, and to lead to the proliferation of firearms on the black market as gun theft becomes more commonplace.
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Another argument for gun ownership comes from the far left as frequently as it does the far right, and has to do with gun ownership being a means for the preservation of liberty; that’s where the “constitutional” part of “constitutional carry” is supposed to lead you to in your head. Putting aside left-wing questions of revolutionary strategy, this law is also weaker constitutionally than its proponents let on. The second amendment does not specify concealed carry. It authorizes “the right to bear arms”, and to “bear arms” for the writers of the Constitution explicitly entailed visibly carrying a firearm in a public setting, or open carry. So-called “constitutional carry” also does nothing to restore the constitutional right to bear arms of individuals who have been felonized by the state; the abrogation of such right being one of the major contributors to mass incarceration, which, alongside mass surveillance, is possibly the greatest threat to liberty today. If the defense of liberty is what matters to someone in their defense of the right to bear arms, “constitutional carry” makes zero difference.
Revolutions, anyway, aren’t made from concealed handguns, but from political parties dedicated to revolutionary struggle, and the paramilitaries attached to these parties, which are usually armed illegally (one must be armed illegally to have an arsenal that is a threat to the government), and which operate underground (sometimes literally). The provisional IRA, for example, smuggled weapons in from abroad, evading Irish and British gun control laws. While armalite rifles were sourced from North America, much more powerful weapons were sourced from elsewhere, including surface-to-air missiles provided by Gaddafi’s Libya. The Palestinian resistance depends entirely on smuggled and plundered weaponry, as well as domestically produced rockets using whatever scrap material the resistance can get its hands on. The Zapatista rebellion has maintained rebel-administered zones in the Mexican state of Chiapas for over thirty years with smuggled and sparsely used rifles, owing much of the persistence and longevity of their rebellion to their non-violent posture and reluctance to use firearms. For example, protesters loyal to the EZLN in 2001 occupied a military base in Chiapas without firing a shot or brandishing a weapon. The action resulted in the closure of the base and the re-opening of peace talks with Mexican president Vincente Fox.
This is not to say that firearms are useless in the struggle or that the revolutionary left should support firearms restrictions. The best way to reduce crime would not be to arm everyone or to take everyone’s guns away, but to address the social forces that push people into lives of crime. A basic social democratic policy slate - universal healthcare, guaranteed housing, unionization of the workforce, and a robust welfare system - would go much further towards reducing crime rates than giving would-be vigilantes the go ahead to shoot first and ask questions later. There is an obvious reason why the Nordic social democracies produce fewer homicides annually than the city of New Orleans does alone. We know why the Louisiana GOP won’t go for such policies: high crime rates scare the populace into voting for policies that send taxpayer money, instead, into the pockets of politically powerful and well-connected sheriffs and their buddies in the private sector who have been enriched by mass incarceration, the Gerald Juneaus of the world who charge exorbitant rates for phone calls to and from parish jails, and who excise enormous profits from running jailhouse commissaries where they jack up the prices on goods sold to inmates; not to mention the private businesses who exploit contracted inmate labor for pennies on the dollar. Mass incarceration is big business, and high crime rates help that business grow.