Does Eliminating Concealed Carry Permit Requirements Affect Crime Rates?
Parker (2026) examines whether state laws allowing people to carry concealed handguns without obtaining a permit or undergoing a background check affect crime. She analyzes monthly crime data from police agencies, primarily using the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System, and compares states adopting permitless carry laws with states that did not. She finds that violent crime increased 7.3% during the 12 months after implementation, representing about 1,765 additional violent crimes. The increase was largely driven by aggravated firearm assaults, which rose 11.5%, or about 408 additional assaults. Property crime did not increase significantly.
Why This Article Was Selected for The Policy Scientist
The rapid spread of permitless concealed carry makes this study especially important because it examines a major change in how states regulate firearms in public spaces. The broader question extends beyond gun ownership: what happens when governments remove an established regulatory barrier to carrying weapons during everyday interactions? That question has implications for violent encounters, policing, and deterrence. Parker’s study is particularly valuable because earlier research often combined permitless carry with other right-to-carry laws, obscuring its distinct effects. Published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, a leading public-policy journal, the article uses detailed monthly crime data and a strong stacked event-study design. Its causal-inference approach is a major methodological strength.
Full Citation and Link to Article
Parker, S. T. (2026). Jumping the gun: The effects of permitless concealed carry laws on crime. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 45(4), e70123.
Central Research Question
The article asks whether adopting permitless concealed carry laws affects crime, particularly violent crime and firearm violence. Permitless carry laws allow legal gun owners to carry concealed handguns in public without first obtaining a concealed-carry permit and, generally, without completing the background-check process associated with obtaining that permit. The study also examines whether these laws produce deterrence effects, alter police enforcement, or affect firearm availability.
An important feature of the research question concerns timing. Permitless carry laws typically become effective several months after legislative passage. Because gun owners can respond quickly to news that licensing requirements will disappear, behavior may change before the law formally takes effect. The analysis therefore examines both the period surrounding passage and the period following implementation. This distinction allows the study to determine whether crime changes only after the legal change or begins changing when people learn that permitless carry is forthcoming.
Previous Literature
Research on concealed-carry laws extends back several decades and has produced considerable disagreement about their effects on crime. Lott and Mustard (1997) provided one of the most influential early analyses, arguing that more permissive concealed-carry laws could deter crime. Subsequent research has frequently reached different conclusions. Studies including Donohue et al. (2019, 2025), Doucette et al. (2022), Siegel et al. (2017), and Smart et al. (2024) generally find that more permissive concealed-carry laws are associated with increases in violent crime or homicide. Estimates in this literature commonly suggest increases of roughly 5%–15% in violent crime following liberalization of concealed-carry laws.
A central limitation of this literature is that researchers have often combined “shall issue” and permitless carry laws into a broad right-to-carry category. Yet permitless carry represents a distinct policy change because it eliminates the licensing requirement entirely. More recent studies examining permitless carry specifically have produced mixed findings, including Doucette et al. (2023), Kyriazis (2021), Moody and Lott (2022), and Smith and Petrocelli (2019).
The article also builds on research concerning mechanisms. Donohue et al. (2025), for example, examine how right-to-carry laws may affect policing and firearm theft. Other research considers whether changes in firearm policy can generate rapid behavioral responses even before implementation. This literature provides the basis for examining both anticipatory responses and post-implementation effects.
Data
The principal data come from the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), covering 2013 through 2020. NIBRS provides detailed incident-level information about reported crimes, victims, arrests, weapons, and stolen property. The analysis uses police agencies that consistently and reliably reported crime during the study period, producing monthly agency-level measures of criminal activity. Because some crimes are uncommon in smaller jurisdictions, observations are pooled into two-month periods for much of the analysis.
The primary outcomes include violent index crime—murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault—and property index crime. The detailed NIBRS records allow firearm-related aggravated assaults and robberies to be distinguished from offenses involving other weapons. The study also examines whether firearm assaults occur in public places, the relationships between victims and offenders, weapons-law violations and arrests, crime clearance rates, and incidents involving stolen firearms.
As a robustness check, the study uses the FBI’s Summary Reporting System, which covers more agencies and over 90% of the U.S. population during the period studied. Additional information comes from the RAND State Gun Law Database, Google Trends, Census Bureau and American Community Survey data, incarceration and police staffing measures, and firearm background-check data.
Methods
The study uses a causal-inference strategy designed to exploit differences in when states adopted permitless carry laws. The primary method is a stacked event-study version of difference-in-differences. For each state adopting permitless carry, police agencies are compared with agencies in states that had not adopted the policy at that point. Constructing separate comparison groups for each adoption event reduces problems that can arise when states adopt policies at different times.
Rather than relying on annual observations, the analysis uses monthly or pooled two-month data. This provides greater sensitivity to short-term behavioral changes surrounding passage and implementation. The primary models use Poisson fixed-effects estimators, which are appropriate for crime counts that frequently contain zero observations. Agency and time fixed effects account for persistent differences across jurisdictions and common temporal changes.
The study explicitly addresses anticipation. Because permitless carry laws were generally passed several months before becoming effective, models distinguish the period surrounding legislative passage from the post-implementation period. Alternative specifications use passage rather than implementation as the treatment date. Additional robustness tests employ the broader FBI crime dataset, alternative comparison groups, larger jurisdictions, and specifications designed to address potentially confounding policy changes.
Findings/Size Effects
The principal finding is that permitless concealed carry increases violent crime. Violent index crime rose an estimated 7.3% during the 12 months following implementation compared with jurisdictions in states that did not adopt permitless carry. This corresponds to approximately 1,765 additional violent crimes during the first year. Results using the broader FBI Summary Reporting System are highly similar, producing an estimated 7.7% increase.
Aggravated assaults account for much of the increase. They rose approximately 9.8%, while aggravated assaults involving firearms increased 11.5%. The latter estimate represents approximately 408 additional aggravated firearm assaults during the 12 months following adoption. In contrast, the estimated increase in aggravated assaults involving weapons other than firearms was only 2.2% and statistically imprecise.
The location and circumstances of these crimes provide additional evidence about the mechanism. Aggravated firearm assaults involving acquaintances or strangers increased 15.1%, while firearm assaults occurring in public places increased 16.6%. No statistically significant increase occurred in domestic firearm violence involving family members or intimate partners. Victims of aggravated firearm assaults also became more likely to suffer injury.
Effects were larger in jurisdictions with populations above 90,000. Violent index crime increased an estimated 13.1% in these communities, while aggravated firearm assaults increased 15.2%. Firearm robbery increased approximately 13.2%, although robbery estimates in the full sample are less reliable because preexisting trends complicate causal interpretation.
The timing is also notable. Violent crime began increasing during the months between legislative passage and formal implementation. Aggravated assaults increased 4.4% during this period, and aggravated firearm assaults increased 6.4%. These results suggest that behavioral responses began soon after passage rather than waiting until the law became effective.
There is little evidence that permitless carry deterred property crime. Overall property crime did not change significantly, although burglary increased approximately 4%–5% across several specifications.
Police behavior changed substantially. Reported weapons-law offenses declined 13.8%, while arrests for weapons-law violations fell 21.6%. The study finds little evidence that increased legal firearm purchases explain the rise in violence, but it finds suggestive evidence of increased firearm theft, potentially increasing the supply of guns available through illicit channels.
Conclusion
The study concludes that permitless concealed carry laws produce measurable short-term changes in violent crime, with the strongest effects concentrated in firearm-related aggravated assaults. The pattern is consistent across alternative datasets and specifications and is particularly evident for firearm violence occurring in public settings. The absence of comparable increases in non-firearm assaults strengthens the interpretation that the observed changes are connected specifically to firearm carrying rather than to a general increase in interpersonal conflict.
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The results also indicate that policy effects can begin before formal implementation. Crime increases emerged after legislative passage, when gun owners became aware that permit requirements were about to disappear. At the same time, police enforcement of weapons laws declined substantially after adoption. Taken together, the findings indicate that permitless carry can affect both civilian behavior and law-enforcement activity. The study therefore distinguishes permitless carry from the broader category of right-to-carry laws and provides evidence about the specific consequences of eliminating concealed-carry licensing requirements.
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