A new study finds an increase in homicides based on the number of concealed carry weapons licenses issued.

As the right to carry expands in several states, the researchers note acute safety risks with the expansion of legal firearm ownership.

The researchers examined the reciprocal county-level relationship between the number of concealed carry weapon licenses issued and gun homicides in 11 states between 2010 and 2019.

“This study takes a close look at the back-and-forth relationship between concealed carry licensing and homicides over a relatively long period of time,” says coauthor Daniel Semenza, an assistant professor in the urban-global public health department at the Rutgers University School of Public Health and in the sociology, anthropology, and criminal justice department at Rutgers University-Camden and director of interpersonal research of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center.

“We found no evidence that homicides are reduced where there are more concealed carry licenses,” says Semenza. “On the contrary, we found that more concealed carry permits issued in a given county are linked to a greater number of homicides in that county the following year.”

Semenza studied 832 counties in Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Utah from 2010 through 2019. Researchers analyzed the number of concealed carry licenses in each county alongside the number of firearm homicides per county year.

“We take this all of this to mean that people aren’t using concealed guns in public defensively to thwart potential homicides,” says Semenza.

“Rather, having more guns in public through concealed carry appears to be more dangerous and leads to higher homicide numbers. Policy makers need to seriously consider the dangers of allowing more guns in more public places, understanding that an increasingly armed society does not necessarily make us any safer.”

The research appears in the Journal of Urban Health .

Source:  Greg Bruno for Rutgers University

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