Gun Laws and Justifiable Homicides: Contrasting Impacts on Civilians and Police

ABSTRACT We examine the association between right‐to‐carry (RTC) and stand‐your‐ground (SYG) laws and justifiable homicides by civilians and police, and discuss public policy implications. In baseline fixed‐effects models without interactions, RTC is associated with a 47% increase in civilian justifiable homicides. When an RTC SYG interaction is included, SYG alone is associated with a 51.2% decrease (when RTC = 0), and the RTC main effect is a non‐significant but sizable 29.7% increase (when SYG = 0).

Their combination is associated with a 36.9% increase relative to states with neither policy, and the marginal effect of adopting RTC in SYG states is large, about 180%. By contrast, police justifiable homicides show no such interaction and are generally unaffected, with a limited exception in baseline large‐city models (without interaction terms) where RTC is associated with a decrease. We conduct robustness checks using large‐city samples, alternative data (Fatal Encounters), and a placebo–permutation test.

Event‐study estimates show no significant pre‐trends for either law, only a positive estimate two years after RTC adoption at the state level for civilian homicides. Permutation‐based inference does not consistently reach conventional significance thresholds. Overall, the results underscore the importance of analyzing police and civilian cases separately, accounting for policy interactions, and exercising caution regarding causal interpretations given data limitations and potential estimator bias.