A Systematic Lottery: The Texas Death Penalty, 1976 to 2016

Although the Supreme Court denied certiorari in Hidalgo v. Arizona (2018), Justice Breyer recognized that empirical research regarding the arbitrary administration of the death penalty could ultimately be used to strike down capital punishment. However, empirical research would only be efficacious if the data were more rigorous than those presented by Hidalgo. Focusing on Texas from 1976 to 2016, our research answers the call for robust data collected over a long period of time. Our findings indicate that the death penalty was rarely imposed among eligible cases—a trend that has accelerated in recent decades. However, the death penalty was considerably more likely to be imposed if the defendant killed a white female. Such patterns suggest that the modern Texas death penalty is a systematic lottery: death sentences are so rare as to be virtually random, yet death sentences are patterned by the race and gender of the victim. Defying strict logic, the Texas death penalty is indiscriminate yet discriminatory

The Effect of Concealed Carry Weapons Laws on Firearm Sales

Despite numerous studies exploring the link between concealed carry weapons (CCW) laws and the effect of “more guns, more/less crime” it is unknown if liberalizing CCW laws indeed influences legal firearm sales. Building on previous research, I hypothesize that liberal CWW laws are associated with increases in handgun sales while having no association with long gun sales. Using National Instant Background Check System (NICS) data as a proxy for firearm sales and state fixed-effects regression models to examine the effect of CCW laws on gun sales in all 50 states the results can be simply put: liberal CCW laws are associated with increases in handgun sales, are not associated with long gun sales, and are associated with an increase in the overall share of firearms sold that are handguns. This work supports the idea that the expansion of gun rights via liberal CCW laws has increased the rate of handgun sales in the United States, but not the rate of long gun sales. Implications for future research on firearms and policy are discussed

Sharing the Monopoly on Violence? Shall-Issue Concealed Handgun License Laws and Responsibilization

Although research has examined if concealed handgun licensing laws may affect crime rates by enabling gun carry in public, the determinants of these policies have received less attention. Drawing on the thesis of the new criminologies of everyday life and the more recent conceptualization of sovereign subjects, this study posits that the expansion of shall-issue concealed handgun laws in the United States is a product of low-collective security in states. Understanding that shall-issue laws reflect state efforts to responsibilize firearm carrying, shall-issue laws are more likely to become state policy when a state has lower rates of police officers and lower per capita spending on police and corrections. Results from discrete-time, event history analyses indicate that shall-issue laws are, indeed, related to reduced capacities to provide collective security, independent of competing political and social correlates. This understanding of why states adopt such gun laws appears to be unique to shall-issue laws and has little explanatory power for newer unrestricted concealed handgun laws

Determinants of Variation in State Concealed Carry Laws, 1970–2017

Why do some U.S. states have more permissive concealed carry weapons (CCW) laws than other states? To answer this question, this study tests several plausible social, political, and economic factors thought to affect the likelihood of this outcome over several decades. Models estimated using random‐effects ordered logistic regression reveal that theoretical accounts based on partisan politics, gendered politics, economic threat, and racial threat largely explain variation in CCW laws over time. Tests for interactions, however, reveal that the influence of gubernatorial politics varies according to Republican strength in the legislature and by region. Also, the impact of racial threat on CCW laws is dependent on the crime rate. Overall, this research advances the literature by simultaneously assessing all plausible state‐level CCW policies, incorporating novel threat and political predictors, and utilizing a larger sample size than prior studies