Does constitutional carry degrade police performance?

With big-ticket gun reforms like the Assault Weapons Ban or universal background checks stalled in Congress, the spate of state laws marks a defeat for the reform movement, which views the trend as a public security threat.

Sociological studies tend to show that increases in gun ownership generally track with increases in violence.

“It’s no coincidence that in states with very permissive approaches to guns in public, you have higher rates of gun death,” said Adam Skaggs, chief counsel for the Giffords Law Center, a nonpartisan reform group.

Over the last five years, researchers have increasingly shown that loosening restrictions on carrying handguns is also associated with problems like increased gun theft and road rage incidents, according to Stanford Law professor John Donohue.