Conceal Carry and Race: A Test of Minority Threat Theory in Law Generation

Abstract

Conceal carry weapon (CCW) laws have generated a great deal of public discussion in the past decades, but little social science attention. Scholarly work on the topic has been focused on finding potential effects of such laws on crime and victimization; little has attempted to explain the trends behind the adoption of the laws. This paper attempts to fill that gap by testing a series of hypotheses grounded in minority threat approaches. Our paper examines whether changes in the racial and ethnic composition of a county predict the voting outcome of Missouri’s 1999 conceal-carry referendum. Findings fail to reject the null hypothesis and show the best predictor of the vote within a county was how that county voted in the 2000 Presidential election.

Keywords

• minority threat
• conceal carry laws
• Missouri
• race and ethnicity