The Retention of State Level Concealed Handgun Laws: Empirical Evidence from Interest Group and Legislative Models

The present research extends the work of Lott and Mustard (1997) by offering the first categorical examination (using an ordered logit model) of various types of right-to-carry handgun legislation across the50 states for 1997. Such an examination is based on the “market for laws” construct built by Crain (1979) and Benson and Engin (1988), which points out that various interest group (demand side) and legislative (firm, supply side) considerations are important in modeling legislation activity at the state level. To that end, we include a number of property rights, demographic and legislative institutional variables as explanatory factors in ordered log it models and tests for nonnested hypotheses. In general, we find that the property-rights movement has significantly shaped these statewide laws as pointed out by variables which measure the amount of federal land present within each state, per-capita income, and death-row inmate executions. Population density, Republican representation, length of legislative sessions and female legislative representation have also had significant impacts on the retention of various forms of right-to-carry legislation.