[The Takeaway] For the second part of our Guns and Policing series, we look at how lax gun laws influence the way police do their jobs out on the streets, and the ways they perceive threats.

My take: police are probably policing less intensely than before, and that has both good and bad implications.

The recent crime spike wipes out 20 years of violence declines

The 2020 murder surge is the largest increase in violence we’ve seen since 1960

You couldn’t create a situation that [Routine Activities] theory would predict to be more volatile,

In Alabama, Roman found, no women received justifiable-homicide rulings between 2006, when the state’s Stand Your Ground law was implemented, and 2010, after which the state stopped reporting its data.

men were 10% more likely to get justified homicide rulings than women. And in Alabama, the disparity was even greater. It was 25%...

Roman, J.K., Yahner, J. & Zweig, J. How do drug courts work?. J Exp Criminol 16, 1–25 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-020-09421-2

Any reasoned debate on firearms policy requires a shared set of facts, and we believe these improvements to firearms data infrastructure can help to establish those facts