Starting on Friday, January 1, licensed gun owners in Texas will be able to openly carry their firearms in public.
By no means is the move unprecedented — open carry is already legal in 44 of the 50 US states, the only other holdouts being California, Illinois, New York, South Carolina and Washington, D.C. That being said, I can’t help but wonder why Texas has decided that now is the right time to make this change.
The new policy is definitely not a response to rising crime. Violent crime has been dropping steadily since 1990, with 2014 boasting the lowest violent crime rate since 1976.
The downward trend is even more pronounced when you examine the murder rate by itself.
In 2013, Texas had 4.3 murders per 100,000 people – that’s the lowest rate since the Texas Disaster Center began tracking murder statistics in 1960 (2011, 2012 and 2014 all had murder rates of 4.4 per 100,000). 
As the graphs clearly indicate, Texas’ new open carry law is not about rising crime. It could, however, be a response to the increase in highly publicized mass shootings over the past year.
In the wake of tragedies like the Planned Parenthood and San Bernardino shootings, gun advocates have argued that allowing gun owners to carry in more places could help reduce the likelihood mass shootings.
That sounds good in theory, and may very well be true in some cases. But when you actually start to imagine real-life scenarios, it quickly becomes obvious that the presence of armed citizens in mass shooting situations could have quite a few unintended consequences.
One of the most obvious examples is crossfire. When shots ring out in crowded spaces, people panic and run in all directions. Someone trying to fire at an attacker could easily shoot innocent people by mistake.
Which brings me to an even more fundamental point: when multiple people start shooting in a crowded area, how can you tell who the bad guys are? This is a problem not only for the good Samaritan shooter — who could mistake another good Samaritan for an attacker — but also for police officers, who could easily do the same.
And beyond these problems, it’s crucial to remember that mass shootings only account for a tiny fraction of the gun-related deaths in America — less than 0.3% if you use the FBI’s definition.
So let’s be real: the chances of a good Samaritan stopping a mass shooting because they happened to be open carrying are much lower than the chances of someone getting scared/angry/drunk etc. and shooting a person who they probably shouldn’t have shot. (Also worth noting: if someone is really set on shooting a place up, wouldn’t they just target the open carrier first?)
The fundamental question here is whether or not open carry is more effective than concealed carry in terms of reducing violent crime. And the unfortunate reality is that we simply don’t have the research to answer this question. From Politifact:
What does more detailed research have to say? Florida State University criminology professor Gary Kleck said that plenty of research has found rates of carry permit holding “have no net effect on crime rates, including violent crime rates, one way or the other.”
However, Kleck said that the research he has seen doesn’t differentiate between open carry and concealed carrying.
Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, pointed us to a 2010 study that looked at whether right-to-carry laws affected crime rates. The conclusion: they didn’t.
“The best available evidence suggests that right to carry concealed laws are associated with increases in aggravated assaults with guns, but have no measurable effect on population rates of murder and robbery,” Webster said.
Does open carrying make people feel safer than concealed carrying? Maybe. But with rising calls for gun regulation in America, I can’t help but feel like this move is more about Texas’ conservative governor and legislature flexing their 2nd Amendment muscle. As Fox News points out,
Texas also has the country’s most federal firearms license holders, from manufacturers to dealers, and the state cites its relaxed gun ownership rules in lobbying gun makers to move here. The National Rifle Association has traditionally pumped tens of thousands of dollars into Texas’ state political races, more than it spent many other places, though contribution totals look to be waning recently.
At the end of the day, I don’t think the new law will have much of an effect on life in Texas. A few more people might start open carrying, but I think most people will continue to live their lives exactly as they did before.
But again, there’s no research to prove that open carry will actually have a positive effect on violent crime. And I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not be a a part of the first major experiment.