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Abstract
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We take lawful gun carriers for granted--at least some of them. We are acclimated to armed men and women in uniforms. We accept that those people are charged with enforcing rules that our society has agreed on, including the possibility that state agents might use guns to enforce those rules. In a broad range of circumstances, we validate the drawing, pointing, and firing of guns by men and women in uniform as lawful, even if sometimes regrettable, acts.
A second category of lawful gun carriers is more controversial. It consists of private citizens authorized by a spectrum of state laws to carry guns in public. This class of lawful gun carriers has long been with us, but has garnered increased attention in recent years as the private gun-carry movement has burgeoned and courts have struck down restrictive laws in a handful of holdout jurisdictions.
As private gun carriers and state laws facilitating them proliferated, skeptics offered dire warnings about the consequences. Fortunately, that parade of horribles did not materialize. Indeed, the debate about private gun carriers has centered on contested claims that the increase in private gun carriers has caused a decline in crime--the "more guns,less crime" thesis. That thesis is contestable because it extrapolates from readily measurable things like the number of private gun carriers to the tougher to prove claim that private gun carriers are the principle cause of observed declines in violent crime.
One consequence of the heated debate over whether armed "good guys" are deterring criminals is that it obscures important insights from the uncontested data about lawful private gun carriers--for example, not whether they deter crime, but simply how they behave with guns. This article focuses on that behavior and those insights.
Available: https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/lcp/vol80/iss2/9
Language: en |