An analysis of the effects of right-to-carry laws on crime requires particular distributional and structural considerations. First, due to the count nature of crime data and the low number of expected instances per observation in the most appropriate data, last-squares methods yield unreliable...

Analyzing county level data for the entire United States from 1977 to 2000, we find annual reductions in murder rates between 1.5 and 2.3 percent for each additional year that a right-to-carry law is in effect. For the first five years that such a law is in effect, the total benefit from reduced...