Concealed Carry of Firearms: Facts vs. Fiction

arrying a concealed handgun in public has the potential to enable would-be victims of violent crime to thwart attempted acts of violence, but also poses potential threats to public safety. Because of these potential threats, states have historically regulated the carrying of concealed firearms. These regulations have included requiring a permit to carry a concealed weapon and basing the issuance of these permits on whether applicants met training, safety, and even personal character requirements. Additionally, states have limited the places in which the permit holder could carry a concealed firearm

Assessing the Effect of Firearms Regulations Using Partial Identification Methods: A Case Study of the Impact of Stand Your Ground Laws on Violent Crime

To understand renal functions and disease, it is important to define the molecular constituents of the various compartments of the kidney. Here, we used comparative transcriptomic analysis of all major organs and tissues in the human body, in combination with kidney tissue micro array based immunohistochemistry, to generate a comprehensive description of the kidney-specific transcriptome and proteome. A special emphasis was placed on the identification of genes and proteins that were elevated in specific kidney subcompartments. Our analysis identified close to 400 genes that had elevated expression in the kidney, as compared to the other analysed tissues, and these were further subdivided, depending on expression levels, into tissue enriched, group enriched or tissue enhanced. Immunohistochemistry allowed us to identify proteins with distinct localisation to the glomeruli (n=11), proximal tubules (n=120), distal tubules (n=9) or collecting ducts (n=8). Among the identified kidney elevated transcripts, we found several proteins not previously characterised or identified as elevated in kidney. This description of the kidney specific transcriptome and proteome provides a resource for basic and clinical research to facilitate studies to understand kidney biology and disease

Empirical Analysis and the Fate of Capital Punishment

In his dissenting opinion in Glossip v. Gross, Justice Breyer attempted to give content to the Supreme Court’s prior command in Atkins v. Virginia that unless the imposition of the death penalty “measurably contributes to one or both of [the legitimate penological goals of deterrence and retribution], it ‘is nothing more than the purposeless and needless imposition of pain and suffering,’ and hence an unconstitutional punishment.” Justice Breyer’s opinion illuminates the central role that empirical studies have played in death penalty litigation since Furman v. Georgia on issues ranging from the lack of deterrence associated with the death penalty; to racial and ethnic bias in its administration; to the extensive delays, cost, errors, and arbitrary implementation; and to the failure to limit capital punishment to the worst of the worst offenders. Two months after Glossip, the battle over the empirical evaluation of capital punishment played out in the contentious 4-3 decision in State v. Santiago, in which the Connecticut Supreme Court found the death penalty unconstitutional in the wake of the state legislature’s prior prospective abolition. The bitter judicial contention in both Glossip and Santiago over the evaluation of evidence of racial and ethnic bias and an array of other empirical issues highlights both the critical importance of empirical analysis to the fate of the death penalty and the difficulty that many judges have in properly evaluating statistical evidence. The statistically unsupportable attempts by the State’s expert to undermine the overwhelming evidence of racial disparity in capital charging in Connecticut underscores that highly flawed statistical evidence will often be pressed upon (or seized upon by) judges who may be ideologically inclined to accept work that true experts would readily reject. If the Supreme Court is able to effectively appraise the best empirical work in applying the Atkins standard, it is difficult to see how the death penalty could be sustained as a constitutional punishment. Unless the imposition of the death penalty “measurably contributes to one or both of these goals [deterrence and retribution], it ‘is nothing more than the purposeless and needless imposition of pain and suffering,’ and hence an unconstitutional punishment.” – Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304, 318–19 (2002) (emphasis added)

Lethality, Public Carry, and Adequate Alternatives

This Article explores the relationship between lethality and the right to bear arms, and considers how that relationship might be shaped by the availability of non-lethal alternative weapons. Prior scholarship has asked whether the Second Amendment includes a right to carry non-lethal “Arms.” An important set of related questions remains: does the Second Amendment necessarily include a right to arm oneself publicly with lethal force, if non-lethal alternatives are available? And how should one evaluate the adequacy of those alternatives

Libraries & Librarians in the Aftermath: Our Stories & Ourselves

Following her experience of the Virginia Tech campus shooting in 2007, filmmaker and librarian Ashley Maynor set out to explore the phenomenon of temporary memorials and so-called “grief archives” using both documentary filmmaking and other qualitative research methods. She subsequently published her findings about Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, and other public tragedies as Response to the Unthinkable: Collecting & Archiving Condolence & Temporary Memorial Materials Following Public Tragedies, to help fill a large gap in LIS literature about the best practices for libraries in responding to crises in their communities. In the years since, her opinions and perspective on archiving the aftermath have been both reinforced and profoundly changed by subsequent tragedies and their influence on our culture and our archival practice. In this work of autoethnography, Maynor weaves her personal experience and methodological research into an essay that argues for more flexibility and less rigidity about any role or responsibility of an archive, library, or individual when a tragedy takes place in their community

Macroeconomic impacts of Universal Health Coverage : Synthetic control evidence from Thailand

We study the impact of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) on various macroeconomic outcomes in Thailand using synthetic control methods. Thailand is compared to a weighted average of control countries in terms of aggregate health and economic performance over the period 1995 to 2012. Our results suggest that financial protection in Thailand has improved relative to its synthetic counterfactual. While out-of-pocket payments as a percentage of overall health expenditures decreased by 16.9 percentage points, annual government per capita health spending increased by $78. However, we detect no impact on total health spending per capita nor the share of the government budget allocated to health. We find positive health impacts as captured by reductions in infant and child mortality. The introduction of UHC has had no discernible impact on GDP per capita. Our results complement micro evidence based on within country variation. The counterfactual design implemented here may be used to inform other countries on the causal repercussions and benefits of UHC at the macroeconomic level