Police shootings rose in Missouri after state relaxed concealed carry restrictions: study
Police shootings increased in Missouri after the state loosened restrictions on carrying concealed firearms, researchers at Johns Hopkins University found in a new study.
Ten states including Missouri saw a 12.9% increase in police shootings from 2014 to 2020 after passing legislation allowing individuals to carry concealed firearms without a permit, according to the study from the university’s Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Researchers examined the impact of removing the permit requirement on police shootings by comparing the 10 states that changed their laws to 26 states that still required permits.
“The trend of more states allowing civilians to carry concealed guns without a permit may be influencing the perceived threat of danger faced by law enforcement,” said Mitchell Doucette, assistant scientist in the Bloomberg School’s Department of Health Policy and Management and the study’s lead author.
“This could contribute to higher rates of fatal and nonfatal officer-involved shootings.”
Since 2017, two dozen people have been fatally shot by Kansas City police.
In December 2019, a Kansas City police detective fatally shot Cameron Lamb in his backyard. Eric DeValkenaere, who is no longer with the department, was sentenced to six years in March for Lamb’s killing. But in a controversial decision, he remains free on bond as he appeals.
Last year, two Kansas City police officers fatally shot Malcolm Johnson during a confrontation at a gas station. Experts who reviewed footage of the shooting said officers used excessive force and did not give Johnson a chance to surrender before killing him.
And last week, a Missouri Highway Patrol trooper and a Kansas City officer shot and killed 26-year-old Mekiah Harris after a high-speed chase ended near Platte City.
Four of the 10 states in the study —Missouri, Idaho, Mississippi and West Virginia— had significantly higher average rates of police shootings after dropping permit-to-carry laws. Missouri, which did away with the permit requirement in 2016, had the highest number of additional victims at 12.7 every six months.
Meanwhile, the police shooting rate in the six other states, including Kansas, did not significantly change, researchers found. Kansas removed its permitting requirement in 2015.
One limitation the authors acknowledged is that police shootings are undercounted in the U.S. because data on those incidents aren’t systematically collected. For this study, researchers used data from the Gun Violence Archive, a database that collects daily information on shootings from news reports, law enforcement and government agencies.
This story was originally published May 12, 2022 at 10:15 AM.