Bogus concealed handgun research by Donohue, Aneja, and Weber

For those interested, the Crime Prevention Research Center has put out a summary of some of the problems with a new study from the Stanford Law School.  The discussion is available here.  A brief summary is here:

The bottom line is pretty clear: Since permit holders commit virtually no crimes, right-to-carry laws can’t increase violent crime rates.  You can’t get the 1.5 to 20 percent increases in violent crime rates that a few of their estimates claim with only thousandths of one percent of permit holders committing violent crimes.  To put it differently, states would have to be miss reporting 99%+ of crimes committed by permit holders for their results to be possible. 

The synthetic control tests where they use anything from two to four states to predict the changes in another state’s violent crime rates are extremely arbitrary.  For example, would you look almost exclusively to Hawaii to predict violent crime rate changes in Idaho, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, and Utah?  Would you look almost exclusively at Illinois to predict changing violent crime rates in South Carolina?  Remember that half of Illinois’ violent crime occurs in Chicago and an even larger majority of the changes in Illinois’ changing violent crime rate is due to Chicago. Would you look at California and New York to predict changing violent crime rates in Georgia? 

There is a reason that the vast majority of published peer-reviewed studies that use US data as this new study does find that right-to-carry laws reduce violent crime rates.