In June 2022, the United States Supreme Court ushered in a new era of gun regulation when it struck down New York’s century-old concealed carry law. The New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen decision paved the way for the right to carry a concealed firearm in public to become the law of the land.

Debates around right-to-carry pit the argument that a “good guy with a gun” can prevent crimes against concerns about an increased threat of gun violence, with research generally supporting the latter.  Many policymakers have framed right-to-carry’s danger around the threat posed by individuals carrying their own weapons into public spaces. But new research I co-authored with John Donohue and Matthew Bondy of Stanford Law School and Phil Cook of Duke University found that while right-to-carry may indeed increase violent crime by 20% in large cities, it’s in fact dangerous because it reduces police effectiveness and increases in firearm thefts.

In 1979, nearly all U.S. states either prohibited the concealed carry of firearms, or required anyone who wished to carry a concealed firearm to be evaluated before obtaining a license, which enabled states to screen out individuals who had no specific need for the permit. But by 2000, over half of the states had passed so-called “shall-issue” laws, which mandate that authorities grant a concealed-carry permit to virtually any individual who applies. By the time Bruen arrived before the Supreme Court last year, only six states, one of which was New York, did not have a near-universal right-to-carry system in place.

Our research began by conducting a review of state statutes and media coverage to determine what year each state adopted right-to-carry. Then, we obtained police agency reports on various crime statistics, which we used to compare crime trends in cities that adopted right-to-carry to those in cities that never did. (We also accounted for other city characteristics researchers find to be correlated with crime, such as the percentage of people who are in poverty or are between 18 and 24 years old.)

Like most researchers, we found that right-to-carry increases violent crime, especially in large cities. But our findings were novel because they probed the mechanisms behind this increase. It wasn’t simply a matter of people with right-to-carry permits committing more violent crimes. Rather, we identified two particular causes of increased crime: declines in police effectiveness and increases in gun thefts.

To investigate right-to-carry’s impact on police effectiveness, we studied the police “clearance” of violent crimes—the number of violent crimes that police were able to identify a perpetrator for. We found that right-to-carry caused a 10% total reduction in police clearance in the U.S. cities where it was adopted. Nationwide—using the FBI’s 2019 estimate that 1 million violent crimes take place annually in the U.S., of which about half are cleared by police—this could add up to an extra 50,000 crimes going unsolved every year.

There are a number of reasons for this decline in police effectiveness. As my co-author John Donohue has outlined in previous work, the most straightforward is that right-to-carry takes a toll on police time and resources, whether because of the need to investigate accidental shootings or simply to process permits. Additionally, in constrast to the logic of the “good guy with a gun,” the intervention of bystanders with firearms during crimes—particularly those who are not well trained in firearms safety—can make it more difficult for police to catch criminals.

Another concerning possibility is that right-to-carry makes police more fearful of the people in their community. In some cases, this could cause police officers to shy away from investigating suspicious behavior; in others, it could make officers more likely to escalate their use of force.

The other key way that right-to-carry increases violent crime is by creating more opportunities for firearm theft, inadvertently causing permit-holding gunowners to provide firearms to criminals. Reports from police agencies suggest that firearm theft, particularly from motor vehicles, is a large and growing problem across the country. And a 2017 survey from Harvard University estimated that there are 400,000 firearm thefts in the U.S. every year—more stolen guns than are even in civilian hands in Ireland or Japan. We found that right-to-carry may increase gun theft by a staggering 50% in large cities.

Much of the public attention on right-to-carry has been focused on the deliberate actions of permit-holding gun owners: whether they commit many crimes, and whether they stop many crimes from being committed. In fact, they do neither. Instead, as our research shows, the unintentional actions of concealed carry permit holders may be fueling violent crime by providing a flow of firearms ripe for theft and weakening law enforcement’s ability to apprehend criminals. Beyond the “good guy with a gun” versus “bad guy with a gun” narrative, the “good guys” can unwittingly end up helping the “bad guys.”

The Bruen Supreme Court decision has cemented what has become increasingly clear for the past few decades: at least in the short term, guns are here to stay in America. Now, it’s up to lawmakers across the country to enact pragmatic policies to curb the worst public safety impacts of a permissive gun-carrying culture.

Teaching responsible gun ownership may be the most feasible reform that goes the furthest to promote public safety. Research suggests that making firearm safety training a requirement of receiving a concealed carry permit has been effective at ameliorating some of the rise in violent crime. While there is no conclusive explanation for why these trainings reduce crime, it is quite plausible that gun-carriers who undergo training are more careful with how they store and use their firearms, resulting in fewer firearm thefts and accidental discharges.

Safety training is no panacea to gun violence. But if the “good guys with guns” know how to safely store firearms and when to fire them, they have the best chance of promoting public safety.

The post Why ‘Good Guys with Guns’ Don’t Make Us Safer appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Gavin Newsom’s new campaign for a 28th Amendment is the most important political idea in the country today.

But you wouldn’t know that from reading media reports following the California governor’s proposal to enshrine four popular gun control measures in a new federal constitutional amendment.

Instead, political opponents dismissed Newsom’s proposal as at best a waste of time, and at worst a dereliction of gubernatorial duty. Reporters called it a mere tactic in his rhetorical and legal war with the red states. Republicans labeled it a distraction from his job running California. Editorialists wrote that it was crazy, because, as the San Jose Mercury News argued, it’s virtually impossible to change the Constitution.

In truth, such objections are far crazier than Newsom’s amendment. The governor isn’t just taking on the American addiction to violence.  He’s taking on flaws in the U.S. Constitution that impact his ability to govern, and keep Californians safe.

It’s hard to think of a policy this country needs more than constitutional controls on firearms. The United States is awash in guns—Americans own nearly half of the 857 million civilian-held guns on Earth. And gun ownership and permissible gun laws have created an endless epidemic of gun violence. The U.S. has a gun homicide rate more than 25 times that of other high-income countries, and a gun suicide rate more than 10 times higher.

And the epidemic is getting worse, especially among young people. In 2020, gun violence overtook car accidents to become the No. 1 cause of death for U.S. children and adolescents.

Instead of trying to reverse this epidemic, the national government and many state governments are making it worse, by reducing regulations. The U.S. Supreme Court, along with conservative judges at lower levels, have reinterpreted the Constitution to throw out gun control laws in cities and states.

One of those states is California, which has had lower rates of gun violence than more pro-gun states thanks to laws under attack, like a 10-day wait on most firearm purchases.

In this context, Newsom’s decision to pursue the 28th Amendment is not some political choice—it’s a job requirement. The governor is supposed to prevent Californians from being killed. And he’s supposed to protect laws that protect public safety. Both are under threat.

As Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer, who is working with the governor to draft the amendment, has said, “We cannot stand idly while courts roll back our work and diminish the ability of our Legislature to keep Californians safe. This bold but fair resolution calls on other states to join us in protecting some of the most effective ways of reducing gun violence.”

If anything, the Newsom amendment is too modest. Rather than the repeal of the Second Amendment our country needs, the governor’s measure is limited to four politically popular measures that should reduce gun violence:

-universal background checks (which would reduce violent crime)

-raising the firearm purchase age from 18 to 21 (which would reduce suicides),

-firearm purchase waiting period (which would reduce all sorts of gun deaths)

-assault weapons ban (which might make mass shootings less common and deadly).

What is boldest about the amendment is the method Newsom is advocating for its passage: using a provision in Article V of the Constitution that allows states to call a Constitutional Convention. Thirty-four states must support such a convention in order for it to be convened. This avoids the longstanding approach of presenting the new amendment to Congress, which can then send it to the states for ratification.

The U.S. has never had an Article V Convention before, and that poses uncertainty. Newsom will seek to limit the convention to the question of guns, but once a convention is in session, delegates might be able to propose to alter the Constitution in other ways. Indeed, some conservatives want to use an Article V Convention to pursue policies like term limits and a balanced budget amendment.

This possibility may frighten Americans, who are deeply attached to their Constitution. This is why UC Berkeley law dean Erwin Chemerinsky, channeling the democratic cowardice of America’s progressive elites, recently called Newsom’s proposal a “well-intentioned, terrible idea.”

But the political dysfunction of the country suggests we should be afraid of the status quo, rather than attached to it. How much violence must we suffer, how many rights can the Supreme Court take away, before we fight back constitutionally?

Indeed, it’s hard to think of a republican constitution on Earth more in need of updating than that of the United States. Newer, more democratic constitutions govern other rich countries in this world—counties that tend to be healthier, happier, and considerably less violent than America.

Constitutional change would also be good for California, whose power is diminished by a document conceived 60 years before our statehood. Newsom, in pursuing a 28th Amendment that could lead to sweeping change, appears to recognize this reality. The second most powerful elected official in the country is opening the door to a new federal constitution. (California, as I’ve argued before in this space, should demonstrate the benefits to America of a new, 21st-century constitution by convening its own state-level convention to draft a model to emulate.)

The big question now is how hard Newsom will push for an idea that is far more consequential than anything else he is doing. One test of the governor’s intent is whether he will refuse to endorse Democrats who don’t join the movement for the 28th Amendment, including President Joe Biden who is likely to resist the divisive proposal.

If the president won’t get on board, there is another way for Newsom to demonstrate he is serious about reducing gun violence and making our constitution. The governor could—indeed he should—run against Biden for the presidency next year.

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I don’t become easily flustered at the prospect of violence. I grew up in Black Los Angeles in the ‘body count’ ’70s, and taught in an inner city high school for five years during the rock cocaine epidemic. I became desensitized to prison-like security and sworn officers of the law putting young people in headlocks—and the sound of gunshots in the distance. Then, after leaving for graduate school and receiving my MFA in creative writing and selling my first novel, my life as a publishing novelist afforded me the opportunity to teach at many of the better universities in Southern California.

Still, some of the entitled—and barely conscious—students I have since encountered at these prestigious schools make me nostalgic for the daily grind of the high school classroom. At the college level I usually grade generously because a fiction workshop is subjective by nature. But with one student I couldn’t bring myself to give him an “A”. He wrote smug and mean pieces that left me depressed. I gave him a B+ instead of the A- he coveted. As soon as I submitted grades I received an angry email from him.

“You have 24 hours to change my grade to an A- or else….”

I was alarmed, but less so when I bothered to read a few sentences down to see that he hadn’t threatened to kill me, rather he’d get his parents to sue me. I laughed it off, but then a female student who was in the same fiction workshop emailed me this:

This may seem strange or out of the blue to you, but it has worried me the past few days and I thought I would email you about it. I’m sure you have heard about the tragedy at Virginia Tech that happened yesterday. Today the news released information about the gunman, who was also student. Classmates and teachers of the gunman have talked about how he was a creative writing student who wrote disturbing plays and stories in class about murdering people. His teacher reported him to the school administration, and nothing was done. I don’t know if you remember this, but one of the students in our class wrote a story that was disturbing to say the least. It talked about stalking female students and included graphic details of several murders. I don’t know his name… I don’t really know what I’m asking you to do, but I wanted to possibly trigger your memory about this. The mere thought of something happening on our campus terrifies me, and if this kid is deranged, or “troubled” as the papers have described the VT gunman, the administration should know about it immediately. I may sound paranoid, but I think when something like this happens there’s no reason to take any chances.

She was describing the student trying to intimidate me into changing his grade. I reported him to the administration, but he kept writing vaguely threatening emails to me even when he was told to cease contacting me.

A few years later another student, a guy who seemed pleasant and a little goofy, made a comment before class in the hallway in front of his fellow classmates that his next story would be about killing his classmates. Suddenly half my students were skipping class (before attendance had been great). Again, a female student told me that students were frightened of the goofy guy. The student boycott got the attention of the university higher-ups and he was interviewed after I talked to him. He had no idea of the panic he caused, or that armed undercover campus security officers were in the hallway ready to handle the situation if I called them in.

I teach at UC Santa Barbara now, the school I graduated from. It’s a university that has experienced its share of tragedy. I was on campus on May 23, 2014, the night when Elliot Rodger killed six people in Isla Vista, the college town abutting the university. I had just finished class in the late afternoon and noticed an email to the campus community:

May 23, 2014

To: Campus Community

Re: Campus Wide “Responding to Distressed Students” Training

The offices of Student Mental Health Coordination Services, Student Health, Counseling & Psychological Services, and the UC Police Department invite you to a “Responding to Distressed Students” training on May 28, 9:00 – 11:00 am. The goals of the training are to provide attendees with a context for student mental health, to introduce and review the distressed student protocol and appropriate campus resources for students, offer suggestions on how to refer students, and review potential distressed student scenarios. This interactive training is open to staff and faculty and all are invited and encouraged to attend.

Please join us on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 9:00 – 11:00 am in the Multipurpose Room of the Student Resource Building. Coffee and bagels will be provided.

Unfortunately Elliot Rodger wasn’t a student at UCSB eligible to receive counseling services and coffee and bagels. David Attias, son of film director Daniel Attias was, but he didn’t seek counseling back in 2001 when he ran over five people in Isla Vista. Both young men had families who knew their sons were troubled and desperately tried to intervene to prevent tragedy, but the efforts didn’t work.

About a year ago I brought Elise, my 15-year-old daughter, to sit in on the fiction writing course I teach at UCSB, so that later we could celebrate the birthday of my older daughter Giselle, who was then a Global Studies major at UCSB. Our plans were scuttled when the university was put on alert and locked down. No one could enter or leave the university while the campus police searched for a shooter. Seemingly it was a drug deal that became a dorm robbery that resulted in a massive response including multiple helicopters circling campus. It felt strangely like being a kid in South L.A. when the police were chasing somebody down.

As a kid I feared being killed because there was epidemic of shootings around me. Pootbutts (nerds) like me got shot along with gangbangers: Friends shot friends as well as family members and bystanders. I learned then that having a gun isn’t a magic talisman that keeps bullets from finding you. The tortured logic is that maybe you can avoid being shot because you’ll shoot first, or get a shot off if the shooter misses—and then that baby in the stroller gets a bullet in the brain. I had guns pointed at me four times; once out of anger, twice out of mistaken identity and, the last time, as part of a family dispute. In all of these instances guns were pointed at me suddenly and without opportunity for escape. The last time it happened all I could think to do was stare down the barrel of a shotgun and smile stupidly. The lesson I learned in L.A. was invaluable: When your neighborhood becomes awash in guns, no one is safe and you need to find somewhere sane to live, or spend your life inside of the house, hiding in the bathtub. What I dealt with as kid, fear for my personal safety, I wouldn’t now tolerate for myself, or my family. Sadly professors at these public universities in Texas—with possible gun-wielding students—have to carefully consider what it means to teach in a potentially militarized classroom.

The Texas legislature must believe more guns equal more safety, and that gun ownership is such an unmitigated good that it should be a largely unregulated right shoehorned into all aspects of daily life. The consequences remain to be seen. I can imagine being a professor at the University of Texas and leading a critique of a lousy story of a potentially armed student. Or the joy of explaining his failing grade during office hours behind my bullet proof partition, my own pistol close at hand deep in the heart of Texas.

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The death of William Klug, a brilliant and affable young professor, at the hands of a mad former graduate student, was the chief tragedy. But as our campus was taken over June 1 by a veritable army of armed law enforcement personnel in helicopters, police cars, and trucks, I couldn’t help but think: Here we go again.

The sight of high school and college campuses in lockdown, with one or more active shooters terrorizing hundreds or thousands of students, has become normal. Since 2013, there have been 186 school shooting incidents, according to the Everytown for Gun Safety, a group that began compiling school shooting statistics after the Sandy Hook, Connecticut, massacre in 2012. Last year alone saw more than 50 school shooting incidents, 23 of which were on college campuses.

In a society facing an epidemic of gun violence, universities are, at their best, havens of freedom—sites of the free exchange of ideas, free and open interchange between diverse groups, and free movement across the sovereign campus island. But our freedom is being eroded as we hunker down in preparation for the next burst of deadly fire. Indeed, the vigilance with which we act on our campuses today takes a toll on that exhilarating sense of liberation—from ignorance, bias, and convention—that the university once offered.

I remember well the sad realization I had after Sandy Hook, that it now made sense to introduce active shooter preparation training for the UCLA History Department, of which I served as chair from 2010 to 2015. In 2013, we had our first preparedness session with an officer from the University of California Police Department. The announcement to our faculty, staff, and students noted that:

An “Active Shooter” is defined as a situation where one or more suspects participate in a random or systematic shooting spree, demonstrating intent to continuously harm others.

It’s an unfortunate sign of the times that we need to think this way, but it is very important that we be as prepared as possible for such an event. In that kind of situation, there are specific things we can do to protect ourselves and those around us.

In point of fact, the randomness of these acts constrains our ability to protect ourselves. If we are in the wrong place at the wrong time or are the intended target, there is little to be done. Nonetheless, the active shooter trainer tried to prepare those in attendance for what to do: run from open spaces, closet yourself in your classroom or office, lock the door, turn off the lights, and keep silent.

These are all sensible suggestions. But I was struck, after a second preparedness session, by the indeterminacy of what to do in a situation in which you find yourself in the same room as shooters. The options, as the UCLA Emergency Management webpage tells us, are three-fold: “Stay still and hope they don’t shoot you, run for an exit while zigzaging [sic], or attack the shooter.”

Fortunately, most of us never have and never will have to face that rather harrowing set of choices. In the meantime, we on college campuses usually put this prospect out of our minds. The more vigilant among us may pay increased attention to our immediate environs, locate exits in rooms, or even run through versions of game theory as we contemplate escape scenarios in our minds.

My own sense of vigilance was heightened during the time I served as department chair, especially when I would meet with irate and sometimes disturbed students. I would ask staff colleagues adjacent to me to pay special attention to any abrupt noises. I would also sit relatively close to the students and follow their hand movements in order to be able to act quickly if they took out a weapon.

I chided myself for engaging in this kind of suspicion-ridden activity, for it seemed to violate the basic trust that underlies the teacher-student relationship. And yet, I couldn’t stop myself from going through a mental checklist of preventative measures.

This is our reality now. Of course, we should follow the Australians and set in place tighter regulation of gun ownership. And of course, we should develop far better strategies and devote far more resources to help those with mental illness. These are absolute no-brainers. What more needs to happen to demonstrate their necessity?

Active shooter preparedness sessions are highly imperfect. They reveal that emergency management is an art, not a science. But these sessions are the best we have at present. And it is all the more important to undergo such training in the absence of far-reaching policy changes necessary to reduce the number of shootings.

In the meantime, even as we know that there will be more episodes, we must fight against the understandable impulse to constrain ourselves even further by censoring our words or altogether altering the ways we interact with colleagues and students out of fear. Difficult as it may be, we must endeavor to preserve that essential freedom of mind and movement that propels the university to do its important work for students and society alike.

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