Removing permit requirements for carrying concealed weapons was supposed to make people safer. That’s what gun rights proponents said as the laws spread across the country over the past decade. By removing roadblocks for citizens to carry guns, more people would do so, and it would deter or stop shootings.
But by that metric, permitless carry appears to have failed, with most states enduring more fatal shootings after the laws took effect, the Trace reports.
An analysis of gun violence data and found that 16 of the 20 states that enacted permitless carry between 2015 and 2022 saw more shooting deaths — excluding suicides — after the laws took effect than during an equivalent time period before.
In Missouri, average monthly shooting fatalities, adjusted for population, were 28.7 percent higher in the three years after the introduction of permitless carry, compared to the three years before.
In neighboring Kansas, which enacted permitless carry in July 2015, fatalities were 24.9 percent higher.
West Virginia endured the largest increase in shooting deaths among the states analyzed by The Trace, with a surge of 40.2 percent. That is in line with a 2023 study in the American Journal of Public Health, which reported a 48 percent increase in West Virginia’s gun homicides in the four years following the adoption of permitless carry, relative to the years from 1999 to 2015.
Two states saw essentially no difference in shooting fatalities following permitless carry, The Trace found. Two other states — Indiana and Ohio — saw fewer.
The Trace’s analysis was based on data from the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that logs incidents of gun violence in near-real time. The GVA first began tracking shootings through media and police reports in 2014.
While these data trends provide a broad picture of gun violence following the implementation of permitless carry laws, they don’t capture the day-to-day challenges faced by law enforcement and prosecutors in these states.
In Missouri, one of the earliest adopters of permitless carry, officials have been grappling with these challenges for years. Peters Baker, the prosecutor in Jackson County, said law enforcement faces “an untenable situation,” brought into sharp relief by the Kansas City Super Bowl parade shooting in February.
“I have a young man with a SpongeBob backpack that’s got a 9mm in it,” Baker said. “It was legal for him to pull it out of his backpack and carry it outside of his backpack. It’s not until he’s in the aim position that it’s no longer legal. I don’t know how to articulate to people how dangerous that is — for all of us, for law enforcement, for the young people themselves.”
Since the introduction of permitless carry, law enforcement, prosecutors, and elected officials have repeatedly said the law has made it more difficult for them to get illegal weapons off the streets.
Baker said the law has contributed at least in part to what was a record for homicides in the city in 2023 — while most of the rest of the country saw historic declines.
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