Crime down in Ohio after state OKs permitless gun carry, but officials clash on connection

A new study shows Ohio’s permitless firearm carry law coincided with a statewide drop in crime, but officials disagree on whether there is a correlation.

Ohio’s largest cities saw firearm-related crimes fall in the first year after the state began allowing legal gun owners to carry their weapons without needing a permit or training, according to a study sponsored by Attorney General Dave Yost, a Republican.

It’s the latest salvo in the ongoing back and forth between researchers to hammer out what effect permissive gun laws have on criminal behavior.

For Mr. Yost and the team at Bowling Green State University, the study released earlier this month serves as a sharp rebuttal to Democrat leaders who have pointed to the law as a cause for their city’s public safety issues.  

“What the study shows, scientifically, is that constitutional carry did not lead to an increase in crime,” Mr. Yost told The Washington Times. “[That’s] what we set out to ask, because the big city mayors, every time something bad happened after constitutional carry was instituted, they said ‘Well, this is because of the Republicans in Columbus are changing the law.’”

In the aftermath of violent incidents in recent years, liberal politicians have blamed the law.

Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb, a Democrat, singled out the open carry law following a shooting that left nine people wounded last summer.

And Zach Klein, the top prosecutor in Columbus, has repeatedly argued that lax gun laws have played a part in his city’s own violence problem. Mr. Klein is currently pushing for Ohio’s Supreme Court to hand local control over gun laws to cities.

But both Columbus and Cleveland saw drops in firearms-related offenses — which the study defines as fatal and nonfatal shootings, as well as crimes where guns are involved such as robberies, carjackings and illegal possession — during the attorney general’s investigation.

Cleveland saw gun crimes fall 6% from June 2021-22, the year before the law took effect, to June 2022-23, the first full year the law was active. Columbus, meanwhile, saw gun crimes fall 12% during that same period.

Those cities joined four others — Toledo, Akron, Parma and Canton — that all saw drops in gun crimes. While Cincinnati and Dayton saw 5% and 6% increases in gun offenses during the study period, respectively, in total the state saw firearm offenses fall 8% in the year after the law kicked in.

Mr. Yost said it’s proof that legal gun owners can be trusted not to break the law with their registered weapons.

Others are more skeptical.

“It’s fair to say that Ohio’s law, like permitless-carry laws elsewhere, didn’t lead to the kind of instant bloodbath that many concealed-carry opponents fear,” Robert VerBruggen, a Manhattan Institute research fellow who studies gun policy, told The Times. “But I don’t think this study tells us much about whether these laws increase or decrease crime on net — especially over the long term, as it covers a very narrow window after the law went into effect.”

Mr. VerBruggen said another complicating factor is that the study period covers a two-year stretch where gun crimes fell nationwide after they peaked during the COVID-19 pandemic.

AH Datalytics, a New Orleans-based research firm, found that homicides fell precipitously in just about every major American city last year (with Washington, D.C., a notable exception).

What would be more effective from a public safety perspective, Mr. VerBruggen said, is seeing if crime fell more or less in Ohio than it did in similar places that didn’t change their laws.

He suggested comparing crime rates in Ohio with those of Michigan and Pennsylvania — two border states with similar demographics and without a permitless carry law. But Mr. Yost said separately that could be difficult since both states have very different laws and policing philosophies than the Buckeye State.  

The attorney general did say some police departments were split on the law’s implementation, specifically the part that lets people holster a gun without needing a certain level of training. But he said the study’s findings help demonstrate that this “was not a broadly valid concern.”  

Mr. Yost said his goal with the study wasn’t to settle the debate over whether permitless carry laws make one state safer than another. He said it was to give lawmakers solid information to educate their policy choices.

The attorney general added that he would like to revisit the study in another year or two once more data is available. At that point, he said he’d prefer to use 2019 crime data as the baseline year of comparison as opposed to 2021.