Guns in Public: What Research Tells Us About Permitless Carry Laws

Rockefeller Institute of Government: “In the last decade, one of the most significant transformations in American gun policy has been the widespread adoption of permitless carry laws. Since 2013, 29 states have passed permitless carry laws, which allow gun owners to carry a concealed handgun in public without first obtaining a license or undergoing a background check. Permitless carry is now the most common form of concealed carry regulation in the United States. To understand the impacts of permitless carry laws, it is useful to consider what exactly the laws change about public gun carrying. Before these laws, most states had in place “shall issue” concealed carry laws, which required gun owners to apply for a concealed carry license, pass a background check, and, in many cases, complete firearm safety training. Permitless carry eliminates these requirements, allowing any legal gun owner to carry a concealed weapon in public. Rigorous research on the public safety impacts of permitless carry policies has, however, lagged behind its rapid adoption. Proponents argue that removing barriers to carrying in public places deters crime by increasing the costs of an altercation. Opponents argue that putting more guns in public spaces will result in more conflict and increased violence. For law enforcement, permitless carry laws present an enforcement challenge. Without a permitting system, it becomes more difficult for officers to distinguish legal from illegal gun carrying. Many police officials have expressed opposition to these laws’ continued adoption. What the Research Finds – Prior research on the effects of concealed carry laws has largely considered permitless carry together with existing “shall issue” laws, treating them as a single policy type. This literature has generally found that more permissive concealed carry laws increase violentcrime. But this approach has limited relevance to what is now the most prevalent form of concealed carry law. A smaller body of work has examined permitless carry laws more directly and, thus far, has found null or mixed effects on crime. However, these studies have focused on early adopting states and single states, or have relied on annual measures, which may not be well-suited to detect short-term policy impacts. Rightfully, other researchers have been concerned that it may be too early to reliably estimate the effects of permitless carry laws. In July 2026, I published a study in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Managementexamining the effects of permitless carry laws adopted in eleven states between 2015 and 2019. Using monthly crime data from thousands of police agencies across the country and a study design that compared agencies in states that adopted permitless carry to those that did not, I estimated the effects of permitless carry laws on crime in the year following the law’s passage.

I found that permitless carry laws increase violent crime by about 7 percent in the 12 months after adoption. Firearm assaults specifically increased by approximately 12 percent, with no significant change in assaults committed with other, non-firearm weapons. The rise in firearm assaults occurred in public places, with an increase of about 15 percent, and victims were more likely to have sustained injuries from these conflicts. Conversely, permitless carry laws were not found to have had an impact on property crimes such as burglary or theft. Importantly, firearm assaults began to increase in the months after the permitless carry law passed, before the law officially took effect. This anticipatory response is consistent with other firearm policy contexts, where gun owners respond quickly to laws or perceived changes in firearm regulation. Taken together, these findings suggest that, at least in the short term, existing gun owners respond to permitless carry laws by increasing the frequency of gun carrying. This finding is backed by national survey data. Between 2015 and 2019, gun owners who reported carrying concealed weapons in public nearly doubled from approximately 9 to 16 million.