On November 30 State Rep Frank Burns hosted a seminar on conceal carry gun laws in Pennsylvania and other states. Tom Owens taught the seminar who is a law enforcement and former candidate for Cambria County sheriff. Castle Doctrine and stand your ground laws were also covered. The video of it can be seen above.
There were around 45 people in attendance. All were white. About a third were female and most of them were older.
Castle doctrine laws allow a home owner to use deadly force against an intruder if they are trespassing on their property. Forty-five states have some form of this law. Stand your ground laws allow someone to use deadly force against anyone that they feel threatened by. Eighteen of the 50 states have this law.
Conceal carry laws state that gun owners can conceal firearms on their person. Thirteen states (in green below) allow it without a permit or other restrictions. Twenty-one states allow it with restrictions such as requiring a permit (in yellow below) while 16 states in red below do not permit it.
Pennsylvania is a state that allows concealed carry with a permit. Owens talked about how more gun ownership made us all safer. I took a look at the gun violence death rates in each of the three groups of states in the map above.
| State Groups | Count of states | Average in Deaths/100,000 | Std Dev |
| No Conceal | 16 | 12.05 | 6.91 |
| Yes Conceal | 13 | 17.89 | 5.90 |
| Conceal w restrictions | 21 | 18.34 | 5.48 |
States with conceal with restriction laws have a 34% higher gun death rate than states that do not allow it (18.34 deaths/100,000 vs. 12.05 deaths/100,000). States with unrestricted conceal laws only have a 2.5% lower gun death rate than states with restrictions. These rates are from 2021 from the website World Population Review.
An argument could be made that with respect to overall gun death rates, conceal carry gun laws have not made people in those states safer. In my next post, I will look at Castle Doctrine and Stand your ground laws and gun death rates.