Back in June of 2022, Ohio started allowing citizens to carry a concealed gun without a permit. This is known as the “Constitutional Carry” law. So, what happened to gun crime? Keep in mind this doesn’t mean everyone can carry a gun. You must be an adult and not a convicted felon prohibited from having weapons or a fugitive. And you can’t have been declared incompetent by the court. That would apply to ongoing drug or alcohol addiction, mental illness, or declining cognitive functions.
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost and Bowling Green State University conducted a study to review what happened to the crime rates since then. According to the results, gun crime dropped across Ohio’s eight biggest cities as a whole. Individually, Columbus, Cleveland, Toledo, Akron, Parma, and Canton saw significant drops in gun crimes, while Cincinnati and Dayton saw an increase.
“I genuinely did not know what the study would find,” Yost said. “I thought it would be useful either way. This is not to downplay the very real problem of crime in many neighborhoods in our cities – you don’t need a research team to see that gun violence destroys lives, families, and opportunity.”
Researchers checked data from June 2021 to June 2023 and looked a crimes involving guns, gunshot-detection alerts, and the number of officers shot in the line of duty.
This research doesn’t indicate that Constitutional Carry was the reason for the drop in criminal incidents involving guns, a number of factors could be at play. However, Yost said the study was a result of mayors of several larger Ohio cities blaming the change in gun laws for crime in their community.
Yost says there’s one thing to take away from the study. “The key takeaway from this study is that we have to keep the pressure on the criminals who shoot people, rather than Ohioans who responsibly exercise their Second Amendment rights.”
A full report detailing the research findings is available on the attorney general’s website.
