A Reexamination of the Criminal Deterrent Effects: Capital Punishment and Concealed Handgun Laws

The specific objectives of this project are: 1. To provide analysis of the impact of concealed handgun laws and capital punishment on crime to contribute to lawmakers' and law-enforcement
agencies' ability to ensure public safety through an improved understanding of the effects of these programs, and 2. To provide a simple and tractable technique for policymakers to analyze these and similar issues in the future.

The research will utilize existing data from the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data
and apply statistical methods that permit the integration of information from various concealed weapon studies. In particular, we will apply a type of model averaging that allows policymakers to reach conclusions on this topic that account for the model uncertainty described above.
By utilizing now-inexpensive desktop computing power, the averaging method can incorporate the very wide range of models employed in the past, as well as millions more. The emphasis here is that no existing study necessarily has the 'correct' method of prediction; however, this methodology can search through millions of possible models and account for each in calculating the effect of deterrence laws.