Sharing the Monopoly on Violence? Shall-Issue Concealed Handgun License Laws and Responsibilization

Abstract

Although research has examined if concealed handgun licensing laws may affect crime rates by enabling gun carry in public, the determinants of these policies have received less attention. Drawing on the thesis of the new criminologies of everyday life and the more recent conceptualization of sovereign subjects, this study posits that the expansion of shall-issue concealed handgun laws in the United States is a product of low-collective security in states. Understanding that shall-issue laws reflect state efforts to responsibilize firearm carrying, shall-issue laws are more likely to become state policy when a state has lower rates of police officers and lower per capita spending on police and corrections. Results from discrete-time, event history analyses indicate that shall-issue laws are, indeed, related to reduced capacities to provide collective security, independent of competing political and social correlates. This understanding of why states adopt such gun laws appears to be unique to shall-issue laws and has little explanatory power for newer unrestricted concealed handgun laws.

Keywords

crime law and deviance firearms shall-issue collective security

Introduction: Linking Collective Security to Self-help and Guns

Collective security is the “provision of security, law enforcement, and criminal justice collectively by the state rather than by individuals and families” (McDowall and Loftin 1983:1147). The assumption that collective security ought to be provided by the state, as opposed to private parties, is common in industrialized societies because law enforcement and criminal justice are viewed as a public good (Musgrave and Musgrave 1989). The provision of state collective security has also been preferred in industrialized societies because the atomized efforts of individuals to use violence to stop crime is thought to facilitate a Hobbesian state of nature (Hobbes 1676), strengthening the state’s claim to a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence (Weber 1946). State provision of collective security often requires the state to restrict behaviors perceived counterproductive to social control, such as the prohibition of dangerous persons owning guns or the general carrying of firearms in public, while vigorously pursuing crime control efforts via law enforcement (Young, McDowall, and Loftin 1987). As such, states may implement policies that prohibit certain behaviors (e.g., selling and consuming certain drugs, or carrying and use of weapons) to better provide collective security. Generally speaking, such a state of affairs is nonproblematic, so long as the demand for crime control is sufficiently met through law enforcement and criminal justice mechanisms.

Yet, the state cannot always protect all individuals from all crimes at all times; lapses of public confidence in collective security are unavoidable. To quote previous work, “in the case of crime control and justice . . . maintenance of confidence in community institutions is often analogous to preserving orderly egress from a building that is perceived to be burning” (Young et al. 1987:49). If law enforcement efforts by the state are not perceived as competent or sufficient, trust in collective security can decline, leading residents to perceive themselves at a greater risk of criminal victimization. Trust in the collective security model also declines when crime is perceived as pervasive, and criminal justice institutions are perceived as reactionary to crime, rather than preventive (Garland 2001). The gun debate provides popular examples of shaken trust in collective security. Consider a handgun owner, living in a city where the carrying of firearms is strictly prohibited, who comes to rue her law-following ways when confronted by a knife-wielding mugger. Skeptical views of the collective security model are certainly understandable for this hypothetical, yet plausible, person.

Doubts about the efficacy of the state to provide collective security may motivate many to seek crime protection on their own. Individual efforts to produce security in response to perceived risks of criminal victimization are known to criminologists as self-help (Black 1980, 1983; Kirk and Papachristos 2011; Kleck 1988; Smith and Uchida 1988; Young et al. 1987). Acts of self-help can range from barring home windows to owning and carrying firearms. Indeed, research finds attitudes toward collective security and self-help are consistently associated with firearm ownership and demand (Cao, Cullen, and Link 1997; Clotfelter 1981; Lizotte and Bordua 1980; McDowall and Loftin 1983; Smith and Uchida 1988; Young et al. 1987). Recent work supports this trend. Gary Kleck and Tomisla Kovandzic (2009) found that handgun ownership in large cities increased as the homicide rate rose, and increases in police forces were associated with reductions in handgun ownership. Jacinta M. Gau (2008) also found that fear of crime in neighborhoods increased demand for concealed handgun permits, and trust in the police lowered such demand. In short, while demand for and efforts to pursue self-help via firearm ownership increase when faith in the collective security model is shaken, increases in state resources for collective security can reduce motivations for self-help.

Although previous research links trust in collective security and self-help motivations to firearm ownership and demand, what is not known is how the dynamic between collective security and self-help influences firearm policy. Ostensibly, collective security arguments presume the state’s capacity for crime control is enhanced by preventing widespread use of firearms. But, in the United States, states have increasingly moved to endorse private firearm ownership and carrying (Carlson 2014, 2015). The clearest example of this policy shift is the widespread adoption of shall-issue concealed handgun license (CHL) laws in the United States, which mandate local authorities to issue CHLs to any applicant not prohibited from having one. In 1980, only four states had shall-issue CHL laws; by 2013, there were 36 (see Table 1). Interestingly, most states adopted shall-issue CHL laws between 1985 and 1996, as the United States crime spike reached its peak. At first glance, adoption of shall-issue CHL laws seems anathema to the collective security model. Concealed firearms in public allow for self-help and may suggest an admission that the state is unable to provide security for all people at all times. Furthermore, such a policy shift may suggest that a state has moved from independent crime control to allow private firearm ownership and self-help to deter crime.

Table 1.

CHL Law Adoptions 1982 to 2016.

States with Shall-issue or Unrestricted CHL laws Prior to 1982
Indiana (shall)			Washington (shall)
Georgia (shall)			Vermont (unrestricted)
Maine (shall)
States and Year of Shall-issue CHL Law Adoption
North Dakota	1985	Arizona	1994	Michigan	2001
South Dakota	1985	New Hampshire	1994	New Mexico	2001
Utah	1986	Tennessee	1994	Colorado	2003
Florida	1987	Wyoming	1994	Minnesota	2003
Pennsylvania	1988	Arkansas	1995	Missouri	2003
Oregon	1989	Nevada	1995	Ohio	2004
West Virginia	1989	North Carolina	1995	Kansas	2006
Idaho	1990	Oklahoma	1995	Nebraska	2006
Louisiana	1991	Texas	1995	Iowa	2010
Mississippi	1991	Virginia	1995	Wisconsin	2011
Montana	1991	Kentucky	1996	Alabama	2013
Alaska	1994	South Carolina	1996	Illinois	2013
States and Year of Unrestricted CHL Law Adoption
Alaska	2003	Maine	2015	West Virginia	2016
Arizona	2010	Mississippi	2015	New Hampshire	2017
Wyoming	2010	Idaho	2016	North Dakota	2017
Kansas	2015	Missouri	2016
States without Shall-issue or Unrestricted CHL Laws by 2016
California		Hawaii		New Jersey
Connecticut		Maryland		New York
Delaware		Massachusetts		Rhode Island

Note. CHL = Concealed Handgun License.

To theoretically link collective security and self-help with firearms to changes in firearms policy, it is important to understand the changes in United States criminal justice policy that occurred during the time shall-issue CHL laws became prevalent. In doing so, this study relies on David Garland’s (2000, 2001) argument on the new criminologies in everyday life and Jennifer D. Carlson’s (2014) extending arguments for sovereign subjects to explore why states have moved away from the collective security model with CHL laws. In the following sections, Garland’s thesis for new criminologies and Carlson’s thesis for sovereign subjects inform the primary hypothesis for the current study: shall-issue CHL policies are a product of the state’s capacity to provide collective security and changes in crime rates. Results using state-year level data in a discrete-time, event history analysis indicate support for the hypothesis. Implications of these findings for future work are discussed in the concluding sections.

The New Criminologies of Everyday Life

In a sweeping overview of criminal justice policy in the United States, Garland (1996, 2000, 2001) argues that from 1970 to 1990, the United States turned away from a penal-welfare approach (characterized by ideals of rehabilitative justice and the clinical treatment of offenders) toward a punitive and incapacitative approach. Penal-welfarism emerged as a hybrid of social theories and institutions surrounding social control, crime, and justice in the United States that combined “the liberal legalism of due process and proportionate punishment with a correctionalist commitment to rehabilitation, welfare, and criminological expertise” (Garland 2001:27). During the era of penal-welfarism, bureaucrats, politicians, and scholars widely sought the rehabilitation of offenders with individualized sentences, treatment programs, and corrective socialization based on social theories that sought to reduce criminal behavior.

However, bureaucrats, politicians, and scholars’ confidence in penal-welfarism was shaken by rising crime rates in the 1970s. At the same time, the underlying causes of the crime spike fostered social changes that made penal-welfarism less tenable as policy (Garland 2001:81). These changes included ecological changes fostering urban sprawl and segregation (Massey and Denton 1993) and the weakening of professional managerial decisions due to increasing public scrutiny (Gitlin 1996; Glazer 1983). These social changes altered the public’s perception of crime, its causes, and the state’s ability to control it. Core tenets of penal-welfarism, such as prisoner rehabilitation and community policing, were abandoned by politicians and bureaucrats as public scrutiny of these policies weakened faith in the promise of penal-welfare efforts to change human nature. This move away from penal-welfarism, noted by Feeley and Simon as “the new penology,” resulted in police, courts, and prisons turning to evaluative measures such as the number of bodies arrested, sentenced, and incarnated as opposed to more rehabilitative outcomes (Feeley and Simon 1992). This punitive turn in policy resulted in a politicization of crime control and incentivized the criminal justice system to favor criminal incapacitation to establish the state’s legitimacy in crime control.

Building on this historical analysis, Garland argues that the decline of penal-welfarism and the punitive turn fostered a change in social consciousness he termed the “new criminologies of everyday life” (Garland 2000, 2001:163), which dominate the social expectations, routines, collective values, and political discourse with the following attitudes and assumptions:

i. High crime rates are regarded as a social fact

ii. Emotional investment in crime is widespread and intense, encompassing elements of fascination as well as fear, anger, and resentment

iii. Crime issues are politicized and regularly represented in emotive terms

iv. Concerns about victims and public safety dominate public policy

v. The criminal justice state is viewed as inadequate or ineffective

vi. Private, defense routines are widespread, and there is a large market in private security

vii. A crime consciousness is institutionalized in the media, popular culture, and the built environment.

(Garland 2001:163)

Beliefs consistent with the new criminologies of everyday life are reflected in almost every action taken by the criminal justice system, political system, and the private lives of citizens in the late 20th-century United States. As new criminologies propagate high crime rates as social fact and public concern about criminal victimization remains prevalent, the collective security model faces challenges; the public grows increasingly skeptical of the state’s efficacy in controlling crime, and self-help seems ever more rational (Garland 1996, 2001; Simon 2007).

Garland argues that the criminologies of everyday life and their challenges to the state monopoly on crime control (i.e., the collective security model) lead to two state reactions that guided policymaking in the late 20th century. First, the state sought to reassert legitimacy of its sovereignty and its monopoly on crime control by implementing harsh penalties for crime (e.g., mandatory sentencing and capital punishment) and pursuing initiatives that mobilize the state to be seen in action (e.g., the war on drugs) (Garland 1996). State measures to reassert sovereignty and the use of violence to control crime are called adaptive strategies. Second, the state transferred the onus of crime control from the state to private citizens by building alliances with private enterprises that shift perceptions of crime control responsibility (Garland 2001; Loader and Walker 2001). In doing so, the state promotes a notion of crime control as the duty of a responsible person or organization. This can be seen in examples of police efforts to organize neighborhood watches, incentives for businesses to prevent crime in their localities, and public-awareness campaigns telling citizens “if you see something, say something.” Such efforts to shift the burden of crime control from the state onto average people are called responsibilization strategies (O’Malley and Palmer 1996).

Responsibilization strategies are used by the state to coordinate expectations about crime control responsibilities, ensure that people know their responsibilities, and facilitate the carrying out of those responsibilities. These state efforts to shape the behavior of private citizens and organizations can be understood as a practice of Foucault’s concept of governmentality (i.e., the cultivating of populations to state rule) (Foucault 2010; Foucault et al. 2009; Garland 1997, 2001). By cultivating norms among state subjects, responsibilization strategies can further the state’s dominion over criminal justice by working “through civil society and not upon it [emphasis in original]” (Garland 2000:348). Along with punitive adaptive strategies, responsibilization strategies expand the capacity of the state to implement criminal justice in societies where the new criminologies of everyday life have become entrenched.

Shall-issue CHL Laws as a Responsibilization Strategy

Turning to firearm policies and collective security, Carlson (2014) argues that Garland’s thesis of the new criminologies has three implications. First, a purely collective security model is untenable in a high-crime society such as the United States. Since the 1970s, public concerns about the capacity of the state to prevent criminal victimization and the growth of private security industries have justified the rationale for individuals to seek self-help methods of crime prevention, no matter how effective collective security might be (Carlson 2014; Simon 2007). Second, responsibilization offers a mechanism for the state to make private firearm carrying a state-sanctioned effort toward crime control. Thus, as a responsibilization strategy, laws licensing concealed handgun carrying transform private firearm ownership from what has been previously theorized as individual self-help into a state-regulated behavior. By prescribing a legal form of concealed weapons carrying via CHLs, as opposed to prohibiting it, the state maintains control over what “responsible” citizens with firearms can and cannot do, and how they are expected to help the state combat crime. Third, by pursuing CHL laws, the state exercises an adaptive strategy that portrays the state as tough on crime, as it sanctions and regulates the use of lethal, private violence on criminals in the name of crime control.

Building on these three implications, Carlson (2014) argues shall-issue CHL laws make concealed handgun license holders into what she terms sovereign subjects. Under shall-issue CHL laws, gun carriers are sovereign because they exercise a power usually reserved only for the sovereign state itself: lethal violence. Carlson states that these armed “citizens—not police, not judges, not any other kind of state representatives—become the ‘judge, jury, and executioner’. Or, in short, ‘the sovereign’” (Carlson 2014:345). Yet, gun carriers remain subjects because they acknowledge that they must carry and use their guns in accordance with state rule. In return, these subjects acknowledge the state’s power to punish those who would use violence, even if they have a CHL, in an illegitimate manner.

Carlson’s (2014) concept of sovereign subjects provides a link between CHL laws, collective security, self-help, and firearm demand. As discussed above, many people own firearms or seek them in accordance with self-help motivations to prevent criminal victimization. Assuming the creation of sovereign subjects is a responsibilization strategy by the state, shall-issue CHL laws can be understood as a state effort to transform firearm ownership and carrying from a self-help motivation that operates outside the collective security model into a responsibilized behavior that helps legitimize state crime-control efforts. Rather than viewing firearm carrying as a dichotomy between collective security and self-help, Carlson’s notion of sovereign subjects allows an understanding of firearm carrying as a state-endorsed behavior that acknowledges self-help motivations, yet still allows the state regulation of violence in crime control. Thus, rather than allow people to pursue self-help motivations unchecked and abandon the collective security model, shall-issue CHL laws allow firearm carriers to pursue state-approved self-help that does not diminish the image of the state’s capacity to provide collective security. When followed legally then, gun carrying becomes a normal and state-approved behavior that does not challenge the state’s monopoly on crime control, and its monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

If states are, indeed, pursuing such a responsibilization strategy with shall-issue CHL laws, when should we expect these laws to emerge? Given the above discussion, the probability of state responsibilization of gun carrying should be greater when the state’s capacity to provide collective security is lower. A weak capacity for law enforcement directly reduces the efficacy of the collective security model and increases self-help motivations (Gau 2008; Kleck 1988; Young et al. 1987). For instance, a state with a relatively small police force cannot feasibly maintain the myth of a monopoly on crime control required under the collective security model; this may be especially true when self-help motivations are high due to high crime rates. In contrast, states with relatively large capacities for collective security may be able to delay or avoid responsibilizing gun-carrying practices. This leads to the primary hypothesis for this study: Shall-issue CHL laws are more likely in states stressed to provide collective security. This hypothesis is tested below in examining both the state level of collective security resources and how the effects of such resources may vary conditionally on the rate of violent crime in a state. Such an examination allows an assessment of how the state’s ability to provide collective security may vary across different levels of violent crime within and between states.

Recent Changes in CHL Laws

While the above hypothesis is postulated around shall-issue CHL laws, 11 states have adopted laws that allow residents to carry concealed handguns without a license, with 10 states adopting this policy after 2010. While these states retain their shall-issue statutes so licenses can be issued for out-of-state carrying, I anticipate that the theoretical responsibilization arguments above do not apply to these newer unrestricted CHL laws. While shall-issue laws require people pro-actively seek permission from the state to conceal carry, unrestricted laws assume concealed carry is permissable so long as the carrier is legally allowed do so (i.e. is old enough and not prohibited from possessing a handgun). The argument that shall-issue policies allow the state to share its monopoly on violence while still regulating its use is different from a more complete relinquishment of this monopoly with unrestricted CHL laws. As such, a separate theoretical effort should be made to assess these unrestricted laws, an effort beyond the scope of a single article. However, unrestricted CHL laws do offer an interesting comparison for the case of shall-issue CHL laws. If the argument is viable that shall-issue laws are, indeed, a case of responsibilization as theorized above, then determinants of shall-issue CHL laws should be unique from determinants of unrestricted CHL laws. Thus, I anticipate the indicators of states stressed to provide collective security that should predict shall-issue CHL laws will have little predictive power for unrestricted CHL laws.

Analytic Strategy

Dependent Variable

The primary dependent variable for this study is the state enactment of “shall-issue” CHL laws. Shall-issue CHL laws mandate that local authorities issue CHLs to any applicant qualified to have one. These laws are considered much less restrictive than laws prohibiting concealed carrying or requiring CHL applicants to stipulate a justified reason for wanting such a license. Data on shall-issue CHL law enactment come from legal research using LexisNexus Academic and Hein Online to identify changes in state CHL laws and when shall-issue bills were passed. This research was cross-checked with work from Jon S. Vernick and Lisa M. Hepburn (2003), Michael B. Siegel (2017), The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (2010) to ensure validity. The presence of shall-issue CHL laws is indicated with a time-varying dummy variable (1 = CHL law was approved by the legislature and/or governor, 0 = no law approved) for each state during the years 1982 to 2013. A secondary dependent variable for unrestricted CHL laws was also collected using the same approach.

Independent Variables

Two unique variables are used to test the argument that the state’s capacity to provide collective security affects CHL law enactment. The first is a measure of a state’s police officers per 100,000 residents in a state. This measure of collective security captures the state’s capacity for crime control by way of its ability to put “cops on the beat,” and has been used in previous research to assess the state’s involvement in social control (Jacobs 1979; Jacobs and Helms 1997; Stucky 2005). Police data were collected from the number of sworn law officer totals in the Uniform Crime Report’s Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted database (LEOKA). The second independent variable used is the financial resources spent on collective security per capita by state and local governments. This measure is similar to those used by other researchers to measure state involvement in collective security (Chamlin 1990; Jackson and Carroll 1981) and is measured as the number of dollars per state resident spent by state and local governments on law enforcement and corrections. This measure of a state’s capacity for collective security reflects the level of resources governments provide residents, with states that dedicate larger rates of spending toward collective security providing more security than states with lower rates of spending. Data on state and local financial resources come from the Census’s State and Local Government Finance data series and were compiled by the Urban Institute’s State and Local Finance Initiative Data Query System, with all dollar values adjusted for inflation to 2016 values.

Control Variables

The adoption of CHL laws is also likely affected by factors besides crime and law enforcement. Variables that capture crime rates, political opportunities, political ideologies, gun rights movement mobilization, regionality, and urbanicity are used to control for theoretically compelling factors that may compete with the primary hypothesis.

Crime rates in a state may influence the level of police hiring or collective security spending in a state (Becker 1968), so state-level data on violent crime rates and property crime rates from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports data were collected. Political opportunities or times when political elites are sympathetic to a particular policy agenda (Tarrow 1998) may influence CHL law adoption. Traditionally, political elites in the Republican Party have supported gun rights (Cook and Goss 2014; Micklethwait and Wooldridge 2005; Spitzer 2007). To measure political opportunities, a dummy variable for Republican Governors and a continuous variable for the percentage of Republican Legislators in a state’s government for a given state-year are included. These measures of Republican leadership in state government were collected from Carl Klarner (2013) and the National Conference of State Legislatures (2018).¹

Gun rights have long been an issue core to American conservative ideologies (Micklethwait and Wooldridge 2005), thus, it is also possible that CHL laws are adopted by states with more ideologically conservative populations. Richard C. Fording’s (2019) extension of William D. Berry et al.’s (1998) citizen ideology score is used to account for political ideologies in a state’s population. Higher state citizen ideology scores indicate state populations holding liberal political ideologies, while lower scores indicate more ideologically conservative populations.

The diffusion of a policy among states bordering a home state can signal “an idea whose time has come” (McCammon et al. 2001). Several studies demonstrate that when neighboring states enact a policy (including CHL laws), it increases the odds a home state will also enact that law (Grossman and Lee 2008; McCammon et al. 2001). A continuous time-varying measure of the percentage of states that share a border respective to each individual state that has already enacted CHL laws is used to control for the effect of policy diffusion of CHL laws (McCammon et al. 2001; Vasi and Strang 2009).²

Generally speaking, it is expected that when a social movement has more resources and members, it can exert greater power in the policymaking process (Cress and Snow 2000; Giugni 2007). The National Rifle Association (NRA), a large member-based organization, has supported the passage of CHL laws and may influence when states adopted CHL laws (Melzer 2009; Steidley 2018). To account for NRA mobilization, the percentage of state residents that are NRA members is used to measure social movement mobilization for gun rights in a state. Data on NRA membership come from semiannual NRA member-only magazine subscription data. Titles available for NRA members include American Rifleman, American Hunter, and America’s 1st Freedom, and subscription data were obtained from the Alliance for Audited Media (formerly the Audit Bureau of Circulation).

Regionality in the United States is linked with support for gun rights and gun ownership. States in the American South and West may be more likely to enact CHL laws because of the long history of rural populations and informal social control, as opposed to formal law enforcement (Cook and Goss 2014; Spitzer 2007). Similarly, states with more urban populations may be hesitant to adopt CHL laws because such populations tend to own fewer firearms overall, which can reduce the demand to use firearms as a form of self-help. To control for regionality, dichotomous indicators are used for states in the Census boundaries for the South or West. Decennial Census estimates for the percentage of a state’s residents residing in urban areas were used to account for urbanicity, with interpolations for inter-Census years.

Analysis

Data on state-year observations are used in a discrete-time, event history analysis of shall-issue CHL laws and unrestricted CHL laws (Allison 1982; Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 2004). The event of CHL law enactment is indicated with a dichotomous variable coded “1” for the year a CHL law was enacted and “0” for all years prior. Because no state has repealed either a shall-issue or unrestricted CHL law, there is no repeated risk for enacting the law again, and states are dropped from the analysis once CHL laws are enacted. This makes for a final sample of 879 state-year observations for shall-issue laws, and 841 state-years for unrestricted CHL laws. As most CHL laws are passed early in the calendar year, all independent variables are lagged by one year to assure the temporal effect of independent variables on the dependent variable is not compromised. Due to the availability of control variables, the analysis is limited to the years 1982 to 2016.

Compared with other survival-time analysis methods, an important consideration of the discrete-time, event history model is the specification of the hazard function with a duration dependence term (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 2004). If duration dependence is not specified, the discrete-time, event history model assumes a constant baseline hazard and does not allow risk for event occurrence to vary over time. Preliminary analyses of the hazard function indicated a curvilinear hazard (inverse U) of shall-issue CHL adoption and a linear hazard for unrestricted CHL law adoption, indicating that a duration squared term was the most efficient method to model the hazard function for shall-issue CHL laws, while a linear duration term is most efficient for the unrestricted CHL law analysis (see Appendix Figure A1).

Three discrete-time, event history models are used to examine shall-issue CHL laws, and a similar set of three models is then used to examine unrestricted CHL laws. The first model for both outcomes examines the relationship of police officer rates, the rate of spending devoted to collective security, and violent crime rates on the probability of CHL law adoption relative to control variables. The second model examines the same variable as the first, while testing an interaction between police rates and violent crime. The third model likewise uses the same variables as the first, while examining an interaction between financial resources for collective security and violent crime rates. Diagnostics for multicollinearity found no variable with a variance inflation factor greater than 5.2. All analyses were conducted using logistic regression in Stata 14.2.

Results

Table 1 lists changes to CHL laws in all 50 states since 1982. A total of 36 states enacted CHL laws between 1982 and 2016, and 11 states enacted unrestricted CHL laws from 2003 to 2016. Prior to 1982, four states already had a shall-issue CHL law, and one state (Vermont) had an unrestricted CHL law. Table 2 presents summary statistics and descriptions for all variables in samples used for the analyses of both shall-issue CHL laws and unrestricted CHL laws.

Table 2.

Summary Statistics.

Variable	Shall-issue CHL law analysis (N = 879)				Unrestricted CHL law analysis (N = 841)
Variable	M	SD	Min	Max	M	SD	Min	Max
Police Officers per 100,000	221.83	55.23	82.00	383.70	214.36	55.05	125.27	594.77
Financial Resources (dollars per resident spent for collective security)	408.02	168.30	116.80	1,071.87	438.56	130.83	139.31	928.07
Violent Crimes per 100,000	487.52	220.51	53.94	1,178.96	401.06	203.47	47.56	1,235.22
% Republican Legislature	39.05	16.57	2.86	80.77	52.71	14.80	11.86	88.57
Republican Governor^a	0.44				0.55
% Neighbor States with CHL	26.62	26.74	0.00	100.00	71.53	30.78	0.00	100.00
Citizen Ideology	52.77	16.14	9.75	97.00	45.59	12.54	8.45	91.90
% NRA Members	1.15	0.58	0.17	4.02	1.40	0.57	0.32	4.19
% Urban	74.70	13.85	36.12	95.36	68.45	13.47	36.10	95.82
South^a	0.29				0.38
West^a	0.23				0.29

Note. CHL = Concealed Handgun License; NRA = National Rifle Association.

dichotomous variable (1 = yes).

Shall-issue CHL Results

Table 3 presents results from event history analyses of shall-issue and unrestricted CHL laws using logistic regression models. Models 1 to 3 in Table 3 report results from logistic regression models examining the relationship between all variables in the dataset and the odds of shall-issue CHL law adoption. Model 1 tests the influence of both police rates and financial resources net of control variables. Model 1 finds that a one standard deviation increase in a state’s police rate is associated with a 75 percent [100(e^{−0.025*55.2}–1)] reduction in the odds of shall-issue CHL law enactment. A one standard deviation increase in per capita spending of state financial resources on collective security is associated with a 74 percent [100(e^{−0.008*168.3}–1)] reduction in the odds of shall-issue CHL law enactment. Model 1 also finds that states with higher rates of violent crime have increased odds of shall-issue CHL law adoption, with a one standard deviation increase in violent crime rates associated with a 94 percent [100(e^0.003*220.51–1)] increase in odds of shall-issue CHL law enactment. Such findings lend early support to the argument that states with low capacities to provide collective security via police presence or financial resources, as well as states with above average crime rates, are more likely to adopt shall-issue CHL laws.

Table 3.

Logistic Regression Results Predicting Adoption of CHL Laws.

	Shall-issue CHL laws			Unrestricted CHL laws
	Model 1	Model 2	Model 3	Model 4	Model 5	Model 6
Police Officers Rate	−0.025**	−0.055***	−0.023**	−0.005	0.008	−0.005
Police Officers Rate	(0.008)	(0.016)	(0.008)	(0.011)	(0.029)	(0.011)
Financial Resources Rates	−0.008*	−0.007*	−0.012*	0.012*	0.012*	0.006
Financial Resources Rates	(0.003)	(0.003)	(0.005)	(0.005)	(0.005)	(0.008)
Violent Crime Rate	0.003*	−0.009^†	0.001	−3.24e–4	0.006	−0.011
Violent Crime Rate	(0.001)	(0.005)	(0.003)	(0.003)	(0.015)	(0.011)
Police Officers × Violent Crime		5.93e–5*			−3.05e–5
Police Officers × Violent Crime		(2.45e–5)			(6.43e–5)
Financial Resources × Violent Crime			6.93e–6			1.81e–5
Financial Resources × Violent Crime			(−7.56e–6)			(1.77e–5)
% Republican Legislature	0.057**	0.048*	0.054*	0.037	0.036	0.041
% Republican Legislature	(0.022)	(0.022)	(0.022)	(0.044)	(0.044)	(0.046)
Republican Governor	−0.112	−0.080	−0.134	−0.171	−0.111	−0.480
Republican Governor	(0.421)	(0.425)	(0.422)	(0.949)	(0.949)	(1.023)
% Neighbor States with CHL	0.013	0.012	0.013	0.004	0.003	0.015
% Neighbor States with CHL	(0.009)	(0.009)	(0.009)	(0.017)	(0.016)	(0.021)
Citizen Ideology	−0.000	−0.025	−0.005	−0.053	−0.048	−0.060
Citizen Ideology	(0.022)	(0.024)	(0.022)	(0.041)	(0.042)	(0.041)
% NRA Members	2.202***	2.330***	2.197***	−0.785	−0.907	−0.680
% NRA Members	(0.518)	(0.521)	(0.521)	(1.289)	(1.305)	(1.284)
% Urban	0.053	0.060^†	0.056^†	−0.104^†	−0.110^†	−0.089
% Urban	(0.033)	(0.033)	(0.034)	(0.056)	(0.057)	(0.058)
South	2.033**	1.998**	1.961*	−1.160	−1.216	−0.932
South	(0.777)	(0.761)	(0.778)	(1.413)	(1.396)	(1.405)
West	0.224	0.383	0.080	−1.092	−0.951	−1.351
West	(0.678)	(0.697)	(0.702)	(1.302)	(1.319)	(1.321)
Duration	0.388**	0.425***	0.395**	0.090*	0.089*	0.095*
Duration	(0.125)	(0.129)	(0.127)	(0.042)	(0.042)	(0.045)
Duration²	−0.005^†	−0.006^†	−0.005^†
Duration²	(0.003)	(0.003)	(0.003)
Constant	−10.994***	−4.698	−9.701**	−1.700	−4.015	−0.553
Constant	(3.196)	(3.942)	(3.474)	(5.511)	(7.348)	(5.666)
N	879	879	879	841	841	841
AIC	251.0	247.5	252.2	111.9	113.7	112.8

Note. CHL = Concealed Handgun License; NRA = National Rifle Association; AIC = Akaike information criterion.

†

p < .1. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001 (two-tailed tests).

Model 2 tests for an interaction effect between state police officer rates and violent crime rates in a state. The coefficient for this interaction is statistically significant (α = .05) and suggests that the effect of police rates on shall-issue CHL law adoption is conditional upon the rate of violent crime in a state, and, likewise, the effect of violent crime rates on shall-issue CHL law adoption in a state is conditional upon state police rates. To illustrate this interactive effect, average marginal effects for predicted probabilities of shall-issue CHL law adoption across different levels of violent crime and police presence estimated from Model 2 are presented in Figure 1. Figure 1 displays predicted probabilities across low levels of police presence and violent crime (measured as one standard deviation below the mean), mean levels of police presence and violent crime, and high levels of police presence and violence crime (measured as one standard deviation above the mean). These predicted probabilities support the argument that states with lower police presence tend to have the greatest probabilities of shall-issue law enactment, regardless of the violent crime rate. Figure 1 also shows that as state violent crime rates increase, odds of CHL law enactment increase as well, while increases in police presence can be seen to reduce the overall increase in shall-issue CHL laws as violent crime rates increase. In short, states with low police presence and high violent crime rates experience the greatest probability of shall-issue CHL law enactment (.11), while states with high levels of police presence and low violent crime experience the lowest probability of shall-issue CHL law enactment (.003). Considering the effect of financial resources for collective security in Model 2, there is again a negative association between increases in financial resources and odds of shall-issue CHL law adoption. These findings support the primary hypothesis.

Figure 1.

Predicted probabilities of shall-issue CHL law adoption across different levels of police and violent crime (Model 2).

Model 3 tests for an interaction effect between states’ financial resources for collective security and violent crime rates in a state. This interaction is not statistically significant, suggesting that the effect of collective security financial resources on shall-issue CHL law adoption does not vary with changes in the state violent crime rate. Although, the linear effect of financial resources remains significant and at a similar magnitude to Model 1. Likewise, the magnitude of effect for police rates in Model 3 is still statistically significant and similar to that found in Model 1.

Turning to the control variables in Models 1 to 3, there are few differences across the models in terms of magnitude and statistical significance. Such findings indicate that some controls do, indeed, influence shall-issue CHL law adoption, but such effects do not vary with different model specifications. The percent of Republican state legislators is positively associated with shall-issue CHL law adoption, with the effect of a one standard deviation increase in Republican legislators ranging from a 121 percent increase in the odds of shall-issue CHL law adoption in Model 2 [100(e^{−0.048*16.57}–1)] to a 157 percent increase in Model 1 [100(e^{−0.048*16.57}–1)]. Similarly, states with more NRA members are more likely to adopt shall-issue CHL laws. The effect of a one standard deviation increase in NRA members was estimated to range from a 258 percent increase in the odds of shall-issue CHL law adoption in Model 3 [100(e^2.197*0.58–1)] to a 286 percent increase in Model 2 [100(e^2.33*0.58–1)]. States located in the South were also positively associated with an increase in the odds of shall-issue CHL laws, experiencing a 610 percent increase in such odds in Model 3 [100(e^1.96–1)] and a 663 percent in odds in Model 1 [100(e^2.03–1)]. Such findings for Republican legislators and NRA members suggest that political opportunities for shall-issue CHL laws do, indeed, influence their adoption.

Likewise, the notion that regional support for gun rights may also be supported as states in the South are more likely to adopt shall-issue laws than other areas of the nation. Curiously, the percentage of a state that resides in urban areas was positively associated with shall-issue CHL law adoption; a finding that was unanticipated. However, the findings for urbanicity should be taken cautiously as significance tests with α = .1 were significant in two out of three models. Finally, the use of a duration-squared term was found to be a reliable indicator of the baseline hazard rate with α = .1 in all three models.

Comparing the results of Model 2 and Model 3, it is imaginable that the effect of police rates, financial resources, and violent crime is even more complex than modeled here; specifically, there could be a three-way interaction. We found no evidence for such a relationship in supplementary analyses. We also found no support for an interaction between financial resources and police rates in a state. Furthermore, the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) statistic is at least two units smaller in Model 2 than in Model 1, suggesting that Model 2 provides a substantially better fit for the outcome (Burnham and Anderson 2004). Thus, the results of Model 2 provide the most informative understanding of shall-issue CHL law adoption examined here. The effect of police rates is found to be negatively associated with the odds of shall-issue CHL law adoption but also conditional upon violent crime rates in a state, while the effect of financial resources is also negatively and additively associated with state odds of shall-issue CHL law adoption.

Unrestricted CHL Law Results

Models 4 to 6 in Table 3 report the results of the event history analysis for unrestricted CHL laws in states from 1982 to 2016. Analyses were again conducted using logistic regression models. Overall, the sample size for this analysis is similar to the sample size in Models 1 to 3 (n = 879 in Models 1–3 and n = 841 in Models 4–6). However, since event history analyses consider the number of events that occurred to be more influential than the number of state-years in the analysis, the overall statistical power for the unrestricted CHL law models will be lower as 11 states adopted such laws while 36 adopted shall-issue CHL laws. Indeed, the results from Models 4 to 6 generally reflect that variables used in the model specification for shall-issue laws have little explanatory power for the outcome of unrestricted CHL laws.

The only primary independent variable found to have a statistically significant association with unrestricted CHL law adoption was the rate of state financial resources spent on collective security. A one standard deviation increase in financial resources was found to increase the odds of unrestricted CHL law adoption by 380 percent in Model 4 and Model 5 [100(e^0.012*130.83–1)]. Such a finding may indicate that states that spend a greater amount on collective security may see unrestricted laws as nonproblematic for crime control. However, we would also expect police officer rates to exhibit a similar association, which we did not find. As for other independent variables of interest, police officer rates and violent crime rates have no statically discernable effect on unrestricted CHL law adoption. No interactive effects were found between police rates or financial resources spent on collective security with violent crime. Such findings suggest that while these indicators of collective security and crime may indicate pressures on the state to respond with changes in concealed carry laws, these indicators are better predictors of shall-issue CHL laws than unrestricted CHL laws. Control variables in Models 4 to 6 are also found to be poor predictors of unrestricted CHL laws. Only the coefficients for urbanicity were found to be different from zero; but, again, these predictors were statistically significant with α = .01 in two of the three models. However, urbanicity is negatively associated with unrestricted laws, suggesting that states with more urban populations are less likely to adopt such laws, which would be anticipated. The linear effect of the duration term is also found to be a viable predictor of the baseline hazard rate as well.

Discussion and Conclusion

This analysis uses two independent variables to reflect a state’s capacity to provide collective security (police officers per 100,000 residents and per capita amount of financial resources spent on law enforcement and corrections). The event history analyses reported here suggest that when states have lower capacities to provide collective security, they are more likely to enact a shall-issue CHL laws. Generally speaking, states with lower rates of police presence, lower rates of financial resources spent on collective security, and higher rates of violent crime experience greater probabilities of enacting shall-issue CHL laws. Interestingly, the effect of police presence on shall-issue CHL laws is conditional upon violent crime rates, such that states with high crime rates and low police presence are most likely to adopt shall-issue laws, while states with low violent crime and high police presence are least likely to adopt such laws. Such findings support the idea that states less able to provide collective security are more likely to pursue a course of responsibilization of self-help via CHL laws. However, these same indicators have little predicative power for unrestricted CHL laws, which further suggests that shall-issue CHL laws are, indeed, a unique form of responsibilization.

Assessing the effects of control variables with the primary independent variables, this study finds that shall-issue CHL laws are more likely to be enacted when states have greater NRA membership rates, greater Republican party presence in state legislatures, and are located in the South. These findings are consistent with previous research on the political determinants of shall-issue CHL laws (Grossman and Lee 2008; Mixon and Gibson 2001; Steidley 2018). This work contributes to previous findings by demonstrating the importance of collective security measures in addition to political factors for CHL law adoption. None of these controls explained a great deal of variance in unrestricted CHL law adoption.

Overall, these findings indicate that states are most likely to responsibilize self-help via shall-issue laws when both violent crime rates are high and collective security capacities are low. These findings provide empirical support for theoretical arguments of responsibilization (Garland 2001) and sovereign subjects (Carlson 2014). By linking the adoption of shall-issue CHL laws to changes in state capacity to provide collective security, this study demonstrates that the expansion of gun rights is not solely the product of political efforts by partisan politicians or gun rights advocates; rather, they are part of a broader change in criminal justice policies and the new criminologies of everyday life.

Arguably, the social changes that lead to the punitive turn in the American criminal system have made the public more open to the idea of gun rights as a form of self-help (Carlson 2015). As a result, the norm of collective security provided solely by the state has become less tenable, and self-help motivations more prevalent. CHL laws are a means for the state to maintain a claim on crime control by responsibilizing firearm carrying for self-help, in effect, sharing the monopoly on state’s use of violence. These findings may also suggest that more restrictive firearm policies, traditionally viewed as helping the state provide collective security (e.g., comprehensive bans on specific types of firearms or even firearm confiscation), are increasingly unlikely to be adopted in the United States if states can continue responsibilizing self-help motivations that emerge under Garland’s (2001) new criminologies. While this study raises the concept of responsibilization and sovereign subjects for CHL laws specifically, responsibilization may also apply to other firearms laws. Laws expanding self-defense rights, such as “stand your ground” laws or unrestrcited CHL laws, may also be adopted in accordance with the sovereign subjects and responsibilization model.

However, our null findings for unrestricted CHL laws may also suggest that future studies need to carefully consider how responsibilization processes should be theoretically contextualized and tested. As a reviewer noted to us, unrestricted CHL laws may reflect the concept of sovereign subjects as they require concealed carriers act within the bounds of the law and such laws have been almost exclusively adopted by states with shall-issue CHL laws. Thus, it is plausible that unrestricted CHL laws reflect a process of responsibilization unique to states with a precident of sovereign subjects, perhaps representing a sort of “second stage” in responsiblization efforts. Our models would not capture this effect as such states are a constant our analyses. However, far fewer unrestricted CHL laws have been adopted which reduces the statistical power of our inferences and may account for our null findings as well. Future work will need different methodologies to tease out this association if it does indeed exist.

Certainly, there are caveats and limitations to the current study. First, it is a necessary assumption here that crime rates will influence how the state responds to self-help behavior. Garland’s arguments for high-crime societies suggest that the public will perceive crime as pervasive; thus, it would be preferable to capture perceptions of crime rather than crime rates, but these data do not exist. So, this work must rely on actual crime rates to capture how the state may be influenced to enact CHL laws. However, it is also the case that higher crime rates, and not perceptions of crime, may influence governments to act along the lines of rational public choice (Becker 1968; Nagin 1998), so the use of actual crime rates in this study is useful. Likewise, other work suggests that macro-levels of crime may, indeed, reflect perceptions of crime (Grohe, DeValve, and Quinn 2012). Similarly, this study utilized two unique variables to capture a state’s capacity for collective security: police rates and the per capita amount of financial resources spent on law enforcement and corrections. These measures are not comprehensive metrics of collective security, but their use in reflecting collective security is a necessary assumption, given the scope and aims of this study, which identifies relationships that may spur further research.

The temporal order of events has been addressed as parsimoniously as possible. Primary time-varying independent variables are lagged one year relative to the dependent variable, which addresses concerns about the timing of changes in crime rate, law enforcement capacity, and other covariates, and their influence on CHL law enactment. However, the legislative process is complicated. It is possible that a CHL law has been introduced many times, and the time it succeeded was a one-off occurrence. While original legal research was used to assess when these laws were adopted, it is difficult to find when they were first suggested, brought to a legislative committee, or petitioned for without exponentially increasing the amount of time and funding required to gather such data. Thus, this study relied on the passage of laws by a state legislature or a governor’s signature, as a legitimizing indicator that the state has decided to pursue a CHL policy. This approach is not uncommon in policy evaluation research (see Kane 2003; McCammon 1998; McCammon et al. 2001; Soule 2004).

To be clear, there is a distinction between the theoretical view of CHL laws as a state strategy of responsibilization, and the actual consequences that such a policy has for crime and crime control. For Garland, it is the perception of criminal activity and the risk of being victimized that cause the state and public to favor the punitive turn in crime control; it is not necessary for this perception to align with the actual risk of criminal victimization. The disconnect between perceptions of risk and actual risk is part of why politicians continue to “make hay” over law-and-order issues, despite declining crime rates over the past 20 years (Beckett 1999; Simon 2007). As such, we make no argument here that CHL laws are effective at either reducing crime or increasing the state’s capacity to control crime.³ Following Carlson’s (2014) theory of sovereign subjects, which builds on Garland’s (2001) insights, the enactment of CHL laws can be seen as both an adaptive and responsibilization strategy, which allows the state to regulate the use of firearms for self-help and encourages individuals to engage in self-help through firearm ownership in a way that appears supportive of the state’s efforts at crime control. Whether or not this strategy is effective at reducing crime rates is another matter; we make no predictions there.

The present study sought to explore reasons the United States moved away from firearm policies that support collective security and, instead, implemented policies that enable self-help motivations. In doing so, it posits that the wave of shall-issue CHL policies that emerged after 1980 were, in part, a product of the state’s capacity for collective security. Although many dismiss clichés such as “a gun in the hand is better than a cop on the phone” as hyperbole, this study suggests that the state may have taken these sentiments seriously during the crime spike at the end of the 20th century. Whether or not CHL laws are effective at fighting crime, harm public health, or make gun carriers into “sheepdogs” among the “sheep” of the public, these policies were more likely to be adopted during times when self-help motivations were at their theoretical highest, and the state’s capacity to provide collective security was challenged. While this study offers a necessary first step in examining how states react to self-help motivations via CHL laws, future research will need to explore both the public and political leadership opinions on gun rights and crime control; specifically, how such opinions could have coalesced with the “punitive turn” in criminal justice policies to explain the expansion of gun rights in recent decades. Combined with the fact that a small wave of states has recently enacted unrestricted CHL laws not well accounted for with responsibilization, this suggests that sociologists should continue to develop theories linking self-help and the state’s role in regulating violence, further exploring how CHL laws fit into this dynamic.

Footnotes

Appendix

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Ryan King and Scott Phillips for helpful feedback.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study received funding from a National Institute of Justice grant (#2014-R2-CX-0004).

Notes

Author Biography

Trent Steidley is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Denver. His research focuses on the intersection between criminal justice policy, social movements, and political sociology. Current projects include a study of concealed carry license application rates in Texas counties and constructing a national database.

References

Allison

Paul D.

1982. “Discrete-time Methods for the Analysis of Event Histories.” Sociological Methodology 13:61–98.

Becker

Gary S.

1968. “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach.” Journal of Political Economy 76(2):169–217.

Beckett

Katherine

. 1999. Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics. New York: Oxford University Press.

Berry

William D.

Ringquist

Evan J.

Fording

Richard C.

Hanson

Russell L.

1998. “Measuring Citizen and Government Ideology in the American States, 1960-93.” American Journal of Political Science 42(1):327–48.

Black

Donald J.

1980. The Manners and Customs of the Police. New York: Academic Press.

Black

Donald J.

1983. “Crime as Social Control.” American Sociological Review 48(1):34–45.

Box-Steffensmeier

Janet M.

Jones

Bradford S.

2004. Event History Modeling: A Guide for Social Scientists. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. 2010. State Laws and Published Ordinances–Firearms. 31st ed. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice.

Burnham

Kenneth P.

Anderson

David R.

2004. “Multimodel Inference: Understanding AIC and BIC in Model Selection.” Sociological Methods & Research 33(2):261–304.

10.

Cao

Liquin

Cullen

Francis T.

Link

Bruce G.

1997. “The Social Determinants of Gun Ownership: Self-protection in an Urban Environment.” Criminology 35(4):629–58.

11.

Carlson

Jennifer D.

2014. “States, Subjects and Sovereign Power: Lessons from Global Gun Cultures.” Theoretical Criminology 18:335–53.

12.

Carlson

Jennifer D.

2015. Citizen-protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline. 1st ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

13.

Chamlin

Mitchell B.

1990. “Determinants of Police Expenditures in Chicago, 1904–1958.” Sociological Quarterly 31(3):485–94.

14.

Clotfelter

Charles T.

1981. “Crimes, Disorders, and the Demand for Handguns: An Empirical Analysis.” Law & Policy 3(4):425–41.

15.

Cook

Philip J.

2013. “The Great American Gun War: Notes from Four Decades in the Trenches.” Crime and Justice 42(1):19–73.

16.

Cook

Philip J.

Goss

Kristin A.

2014. The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know. 1st ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

17.

Cress

Daniel M.

Snow

David A.

2000. “The Outcomes of Homeless Mobilization: The Influence of Organization, Disruption, Political Mediation, and Framing.” American Journal of Sociology 105(4):1063–104.

18.

Enns

Peter K.

Koch

Julianna

. 2013. “Public Opinion in the U.S. States 1956 to 2010.” State Politics & Policy Quarterly 13(3):349–72.

19.

Feeley

Malcolm M.

Simon

Jonathan

. 1992. “The New Penology: Notes on the Emerging Strategy of Corrections and Its Implications.” Criminology 30(4):449–74.

20.

Fording

Richard C.

2019. “State Ideology Data.” Retrieved April 22, 2019 (https://rcfording.wordpress.com/state-ideology-data/).

21.

Foucault

Michel

. 2010. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. Reprint ed. New York: Picador.

22.

Foucault

Michel

Ewald

François

Fontana

Alessandro

Davidson

Arnold I.

2009. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978. 1st ed., edited by Senellart

New York: Picador.

23.

Garland

David

. 1996. “The Limits of the Sovereign State: Strategies of Crime Control in Contemporary Society.” British Journal of Criminology 36(4):445–71.

24.

Garland

David

. 1997. “‘Governmentality’ and the Problem of Crime: Foucault, Criminology, Sociology.” Theoretical Criminology 1(2):173–214.

25.

Garland

David

. 2000. “The Culture of High Crime Societies.” British Journal of Criminology 40(3):347–75.

26.

Garland

David

. 2001. The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society. 1 ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

27.

Gau

Jacinta M.

2008. “A Neighborhood-Level Analysis of Concealed Hand-gun Permits.” Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management 31(4):674–93.

28.

Gitlin

Todd

. 1996. The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars. Reprint ed. New York: Holt Paperbacks.

29.

Giugni

Marco

. 2007. “Useless Protest? A Time-series Analysis of the Policy Outcomes of Ecology, Antinuclear, and Peace Movements in the United States, 1977–1995.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 12(1):53–77.

30.

Glazer

Nathan

. 1983. “Towards a Self-service Society?.” The Public Interest 70:66–90.

31.

Grohe

Bonnie

DeValve

Michael

Quinn

Elizabeth

. 2012. “Is Perception Reality? The Comparison of Citizens’ Levels of Fear of Crime versus Perception of Crime Problems in Communities.” Crime Prevention and Community Safety 14(3):196–211.

32.

Grossman

Richard S.

Lee

Stephen A.

2008. “May Issue versus Shall Issue: Explaining the Pattern of Concealed-Carry Handgun Laws, 1960–2001.” Contemporary Economic Policy 26(2):198–206.

33.

Hobbes

Thomas

. 1676. Leviathan. London, England: Dent.

34.

Jackson

Pamela Irving

Carroll

Leo

. 1981. “Race and the War on Crime: The Sociopolitical Determinants of Municipal Police Expenditures in 90 Non-southern U.S. Cities.” American Sociological Review 46(3):290–305.

35.

Jacobs

David

. 1979. “Inequality and Police Strength: Conflict Theory and Coercive Control in Metropolitan Areas.” American Sociological Review 44(6):913–25.

36.

Jacobs

David

Helms

Ronald E.

1997. “Testing Coercive Explanations for Order: The Determinants of Law Enforcement Strength over Time.” Social Forces 75(4):1361–92.

37.

Kane

Melinda

. 2003. “Social Movement Policy Success: Decriminalizing State Sodomy Laws, 1969–1998.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 8(3):313–34.

38.

Kirk

David S.

Papachristos

Andrew V.

2011. “Cultural Mechanisms and the Persistence of Neighborhood Violence.” American Journal of Sociology 116(4):1190–233.

39.

Klarner

Carl

. 2013. “State Partisan Balance Data, 1937–2011.” Retrieved July 1, 2019 (https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/LZHMG3).

40.

Kleck

Gary

. 1988. “Crime Control through the Private Use of Armed Force.” Social Problems 35(1):1–21.

41.

Kleck

Gary

Kovandzic

Tomisla

. 2009. “City-level Characteristics and Individual Handgun Ownership: Effects of Collective Security and Homicide.” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 25(1):45–66.

42.

Lizotte

Alan J.

Bordua

David J.

1980. “Firearms Ownership for Sport and Protection: Two Divergent Models.” American Sociological Review 45(2):229–44.

43.

Loader

Ian

Walker

Neil

. 2001. “Policing as a Public Good: Reconstituting the Connections between Policing and the State.” Theoretical Criminology 5(1):9–35.

44.

Massey

Douglas S.

Denton

Nancy A.

1993. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

45.

McCammon

Holly J.

1998. “Using Event History Analysis in Historical Research: With Illustrations from a Study of the Passage of Women’s Protective Legislation.” International Review of Social History 43(Suppl. 6):33–55.

46.

McCammon

Holly J.

Campbell

Karen E.

Granberg

Ellen M.

Mowery

Christine

. 2001. “How Movements Win: Gendered Opportunity Structures and U.S. Women’s Suffrage Movements, 1866 to 1919.” American Sociological Review 66(1):49–70.

47.

McDowall

David

Loftin

Colin

. 1983. “Collective Security and the Demand for Legal Handguns.” American Journal of Sociology 88(6):1146–61.

48.

Melzer

Scott

. 2009. Gun Crusaders: The NRA’s Culture War. New York: New York University Press.

49.

Micklethwait

John

Wooldridge

Adrian

. 2005. The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America. New York: Penguin Books.

50.

Mixon

Franklin G.

Gibson

M. Troy

. 2001. “The Retention of State Level Concealed Handgun Laws: Empirical Evidence from Interest Group and Legislative Models.” Public Choice 107(1):1–20.

51.

Musgrave

Richard Abel

Musgrave

Peggy B.

1989. Public Finance in Theory and Practice. 5 Sub ed. New York: McGraw-Hill College.

52.

Nagin

Daniel S.

1998. “Criminal Deterrence Research at the Outset of the Twenty-first Century.” Crime and Justice: A Review of Research 23:1–42.

53.

National Conference of State Legislatures. 2018. “State Partisan Composition.” Retrieved March 27, 2018 (http://www.ncsl.org/research/about-state-legislatures/partisan-composition.aspx).

54.

O’Malley

Pat

Palmer

Darren

. 1996. “Post-Keynesian Policing.” Economy and Society 25(2):137–55.

55.

Rosenfeld

Richard

. 2005. “Firearms Research and the Crime Drop.” Criminology & Public Policy 4(4):799–806.

56.

Siegel

Michael B.

2017. State Firearm Law Database. Retrieved August 7, 2017 (https://www.statefirearmlaws.org/).

57.

Simon

Johnathan

. 2007. Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

58.

Smith

Douglas A.

Uchida

Craig D.

1988. “The Social Organization of Self-help: A Study of Defensive Weapon Ownership.” American Sociological Review 53(1):94–102.

59.

Soule

Sarah A.

2004. “Going to the Chapel? Same-sex Marriage Bans in the United States, 1973–2000.” Social Problems 51(4):453–77.

60.

Spitzer

Robert J.

2007. The Politics of Gun Control. Washington, DC: CQ Press.

61.

Steidley

Trent

. 2018. “Big Guns or Big Talk? How the National Rifle Association Matters for Conceal Carry Weapons Laws.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 23(1):101–25.

62.

Stucky

Thomas D.

2005. “Local Politics and Police Strength.” Justice Quarterly 22(2):139–69.

63.

Tarrow

Sidney G.

1998. Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

64.

Vasi

Ion Bogdan

Strang

David

. 2009. “Civil Liberty in America: The Diffusion of Municipal Bill of Rights Resolutions after the Passage of the USA PATRIOT Act.” American Journal of Sociology 114(6):1716–64.

65.

Vernick

Jon S.

Hepburn

Lisa M.

2003. “State and Federal Gun Laws: Trends for 1970–99.” Pp. 345–411 in Evaluating Gun Policy: Effects on Crime and Violence, edited by Ludwig

Cook

P. J.

Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

66.

Weber

Max

. 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Edited by Geth

H. H.

Mills

C. W.

New York: Oxford University Press.

67.

Charles F.

Wellford

Pepper

John V.

Petrie

Carol V.

, eds. 2004. Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

68.

Young

Robert L.

McDowall

David

Loftin

Colin

. 1987. “Collective Security and the Ownership of Firearms for Protection.” Criminology 25(1):47–62.