Conceal Carry and Race: A Test of Minority Threat Theory in Law Generation

Abstract

Conceal carry weapon (CCW) laws have generated a great deal of public discussion in the past decades, but little social science attention. Scholarly worked on the topic has been focused on finding potential effects of such laws on crime and victimization; little has attempted to explain the trends behind the adoption of the laws. This paper attempts to fill that gap by testing a series of hypotheses grounded in minority threat approaches. Our paper examines whether or not changes in the racial and ethnic composition of a county predict the voting outcome of Missouri's 1999 conceal-carry referendum. Findings fail to reject the null hypothesis and show the best predictor of the vote within a county was how that county voted in the 2000 Presidential election.

Gun‐free Zones? Political Opportunities, Resource Mobilization, and Shooting Sports Organizations at U.S. Colleges and Universities

“…For example, schools located in states that showed more support for Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign are significantly more likely to have student shooting sports organizations. This finding aligns with previous studies that have shown that support for the Republican Party is central to understanding gun‐related outcomes (Mullins and Kavish 2017; Steidley 2018; Stucky et al 2008). Yet, the presence of a permissive handgun law in a state appears to play no role in the presence of student shooting sports organizations.…”

“…Additionally, to assess the role of state laws regarding gun rights, we constructed a dichotomous variable to indicate whether a state generally grants its residents the right to carry a concealed handgun (yes=“1”). Restrictive states were defined as having implemented limited, “may issue” laws, while permissive states were defined as having implemented “shall issue,” “constitutional carry,” or reasonable issue statutes (Mullins and Kavish 2017; NRA‐ILA 2019a; Steidley 2018). Data from the NRA‐ILA (2019a) were used to construct this variable.…”

“…First, we expect that schools located in states that tend to support and elect Republican politicians will be more likely to have shooting sports organizations. Literature pertaining to the sociology of guns has consistently shown that the Republican Party has been integral to the advancement of gun rights in the United States (e.g., Malone and Steidley 2019; Mullins and Kavish 2017; Steidley 2018; Stucky et al 2008; Thompson and Stidham 2010). The NRA also endorses and donates money to Republican politicians at much higher rates than Democratic politicians (Weiss and Gould 2018).…”

“…Although historically sociologists often conceded such discussions to economists (Ayres and Donohue 2003; Ghent and Grant 2015; Gius 2015; Lott 1997), criminal justice scholars (Costanza and Kilburn 2004), political scientists (Stucky, Miller, and Murphy 2008), and epidemiologists (Metzl and MacLeish 2015; Siegel et al 2019), sociologists are increasingly carrying out scholarship on guns and society. For example, some sociologists have explored the social dynamics of firearms possession, linking people’s race, gender, socioeconomic status, and political party affiliation to their attitudes about firearms and desires to possess them (Carlson 2015; Cassino and Besen‐Cassino 2020; Mullins and Kavish 2017; Shapira, Jensen, and Lin 2018; Stroud 2015). Other sociologists have explored the links between gun ownership and people’s personal health and well‐being, including their personal happiness (Hill, Dowd‐Arrow, Davis, and Burdette 2020b), fears (Dowd‐Arrow, Hill, and Burdette 2019), and sleep habits (Hill, Dowd‐Arrow, Burdette, and Hale 2020a).…”

Determinants of Variation in State Concealed Carry Laws, 1970–2016

“…Combined with the fact that whites historically have viewed themselves as being responsible for keeping minorities from legally obtaining and carrying weapons (Light ), it is plausible that many white voters may choose to maintain more restrictive gun laws in some instances . Indeed, the possibility of such a threat‐induced outcome is not entirely unprecedented, as a recent cross‐sectional study by Mullins and Kavish () finds some evidence—in the form of a negative relationship between changes in black population size and the proportion of county‐level votes for less restrictive state CCW laws in Missouri—consistent with this line of reasoning. Accordingly, this study hypothesizes that in states with larger black and Hispanic populations, more permissive CCW laws will be less likely (H5 and H6).…”